When I tried to send the email however, I received an error message. It stated: Error. File.exe is an executable file. For security reasons, Google Mail does not allow you to send this type of file.

A click on OK displayed the compose message screen again, with the file still being attached to the email.

What I needed was a workaround. Sure, I could for instance upload the executable file to a file hosting website like Mediafire, and copy and paste the share file url in the email instead. That’s a possibility and not a bad one.

Then again, I prefer a more straightforward approach. I first tried zipping the file to see if that was enough to bypass the file filter on Gmail. It was not. The very same message was displayed and the email failed to send.

Next thing I tried was to zip the executable file and apply a password to the file to see if that would bypass the executable file filter which it did not as well. Both options did not yield the desired result. Gmail was still blocking the email from being send. I did some experiments with different encryption formats, and found out that 7-zip files that contain executable files can be send, while more common extensions like zip or gz are blocked.

Lastly I decided to change the file extension of the executable, from exe to txt. And lo and behold, the email went through the filters. Changing the file extension of the attachment can be problematic in itself, especially so if you are not the recipient of the email. You need to provide instructions, preferably in the message, that the file extension needs to be changed before the file can be run on the target computer.

So, if you want to send an executable as an attachment from your Gmail account, you either need to rename the file extension to bypass the filter, upload the file elsewhere and link to it in the mail body, or use a compression format like 7z. The latter being the most comfortable option if the recipient uses a tool that supports the unpacking of those files.

Is there an option that I have overlooked? Let me know in the comments.

If you look at the example on the screenshot above you see that it is not possible to identify the file extension or full name of the email attachment. Sure, you can hover the file to see the full name of the attachment, but imagine having to do that not for one but for multiple files, every day.

The first thing that I did to find out if there was a setting for this was to look in the email client’s options, but the results were frustrating. No option, not even in the config editor. Second best bet was an extension, and again the search was fruitless.

The last option was to make changes to the userchrome.css file to manipulate the display in the email program. And this works. Here is what you need to do.

Locate your Thunderbird profile directory on your computer system. You can check Mozillazine for detailed information on how to locate the Thunderbird profile folder. In short:

• Windows XP / 2000: C:\Documents and Settings\\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\
• Windows Vista / 7: C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Thunderbird\Profiles\\
• Linux: ~/.thunderbird// or ~/.mozilla-thunderbird
• Mac OS: ~/Library/Thunderbird/Profiles// or ~/Library/Application Support/Thunderbird/Profiles//

Now that you know where the profile folder is located you need to open it in a system file browser. Locate or create the chrome folder in the root Thunderbird profile folder and locate or create the file userchrome.css in there. The easiest way to create the userchrome.css file is to create a simple text document and rename it. Ensure that the file extension is .css and not .txt.

Open the file afterwards and add the following line to it:

#attachmentBucket, .attachmentBox {min-width: 25em;}

The important parameter is 25em at the end. This defines the width of the attachment area for each attachment in Thunderbird. Depending on the attachment names you get you may want to increase or decrease the value to make the box wider or smaller.

You need to restart Thunderbird before the changes become visible. As you can see in the example from my system, the email client now displays the attachment’s name in full.

Users of Microsoft Outlook 2010 may have noticed that the email client is not nearly as flexible when it comes to sending large file attachments. A limit of 20 Megabytes seems to have been hard coded into the email client. The settings do not offer any option to increase or decrease the attachment size limit.

Outlook 2010 users who try to add an attachment exceeding the 20 Megabyte limit receive a notification that “the attachment size exceeds the allowable limit”. That could be a problem if the email provider supports larger attachment sizes. It is obviously possible to split the attachment but this would mean more work both for the sender and recipient as the attachments need to be split, and joined.

outlook 2010 attachment exceeds limit

Most Outlook users do not know that it is possible to change the attachment size limit in the email program. The process requires manual editing of the Windows Registry, and it is recommended to create a system restore point or other form of backup before proceeding (see backup registry for pointers).

Open The Windows Registry editor by pressing Windows-R, typing regedit and the enter key in the end.

Navigate in the left Registry structure to the key

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Outlook\Preferences

Move the mouse to the right window over blank space and right-click there. This opens a context menu, select New > DWORD (32-bit) value from the list.

Name the new value MaximumAttachmentSize. Double-click the new parameter after it has been created and change the default value to another one. The new value has to be entered in Kilobytes. The easiest way to calculate the Kilobyte value is to multiple the Megabyte attachment size that you want, say 30, with 1024. You would in this case change to decimal in the window, and enter 30720 as the new value of the parameter to increase the attachment size limit to 30 Megabytes.

Setting the value to 0 removes the attachment size limit completely, which means that Outlook will try to send emails regardless of their size. Please note that this does not mean that they are accepted by the Internet Provider. (via NirmalTv)

Yahoo Mail today announced the integration of the Drop.io service as an application into Yahoo Mail. Drop.io is a file hosting service on the Internet that can be used to upload and share files on the Internet.

The Yahoo Mail solution adds a one-click solution to upload attachments with a size of up to 100 Megabytes. Users who receive emails with attachments that have been uploaded this way will see a link that is pointing to the uploaded files. Recipients have then options to view online or download the attachments to their computer system.

Yahoo Mail users who do not see Applications in the left sidebar need to visit the Yahoo Mail Applications page to enable them. The Attach Large Files is then available from the applications menu. The feature makes it a bit easier and more comfortable for users to share larger files although this method can be easily replicated manually by users who use different online email services like Gmail.

The Microsoft Outlook Attachment Extractor is a small software program for the Windows operating system that can extract and remove email attachments from selected Microsoft Outlook folders. Extracting in this case simply means to save the attachments of a selected Outlook folder to another location on the computer system. Removing on the other hand means that the attachments will get unlinked from the email messages which will free up the space on the hard drive that the Outlook mails and profiles reside on.

This does not have to mean that the attachment cannot be opened from the email anymore. It is possible to remove the attachment from the Outlook folder completely, to replace it with a link pointing to the new location of the files or to replace it with a text reference in the email attachment.

Several options are available to configure the process in detail. It is for example possible to only process attachments that have a specific extension or those that are larger than a certain file size. The destination folder for the attachments can be selected as well as rules on how to process already existing files.

The Outlook Attachment Remover can also be used to add the removed attachments to the email messages again at a later point if the need arises.

These Outlook email attachments are then displayed in the usual table format that Nirsoft uses in most of their software programs which gives the user options to sort the data in all possible ways. The information that are extracted from the Outlook emails are the filename of the email attachment, the recipient, file size and data of creation among other values.

Email attachments can be selected by the user to retrieve additional information about them. It is possible to save email attachments by selecting them and clicking on the Save selected items button in the software program. It is furthermore possible to delete selected email attachments directly in the software as well. This could be a handy way of copying email attachments from Outlook to another hard drive to free up some disk space.

The list of email attachments that has been found can be exported into various formats including text, html and xml. A few command line parameters are available to export the email attachments directly. There is however no way to access the Microsoft Outlook attachments of another user of the computer system.

The free version makes it possible to share files of up to 1 gigabyte in size. Pando offers commercial upgrades for file sizes of up to 50 gigabytes. The Pando client can be downloaded for Windows and Macintosh while Linux users will have to use a Pando beta client that was only mentioned in the forums.

Packages expire after a certain period of time with no downloads. That time is seven days for email / im packages in the free version and unlimited for the biggest commercial version

Integrating Pando downloads in your websites is another great feature. Users can click on a Pando link and download it using the Pando client. The only drawback of this method is that those downloads expire after 30 days of inactivity. Only the Publisher package, the biggest commercial package keeps the files for an unlimited time on their servers.

Here is a short list of the differences of the free and commercial versions of Pando:

• Free (max file size 1 gigabyte, expires after 7 days [email / im] and 30 days [webdownloads]
• Pando Plus (max file size 3 gigabytes, expires after 30 days [email / im / webdownloads, $4.95 per month, $49,95 per year)
• Pando Pro (max file size 5 gigabytes, expires after 30 days [email / im / webdownloads], faster downloads for recipients, $19.95 per month, $199,95 per year)
• Pando Publisher (max file size 50 gigabytes, never expires fastest downloads for recipients, $49.95 per month, $499,95 per year)