[ale] g-mail blocks tar.gz attachments, but not .zip...

aaron aaron at pd.org
Sat Feb 4 09:34:15 EST 2006


On Saturday 04 February 2006 10:28, Paul Cartwright wrote:
> On Fri February 3 2006 9:23 pm, aaron wrote:
> > I have found g-mail accounts to be a handy service for sharing,
> > xferring and storing files in a web accessable space. The only
> > caveat I've encountered is that google disallows certain file types
> > as attachments on both incoming or outgoing g-mail.
> 
> I didn't know that. lately my son has been sending me emails from his 
> gmail account, except I never got them. I found a bunch of them last 
> night, amungst my S P A M emails in that folder.. every one of his 
> emails to me from his gmail account ended up in my S P A M folder.
> of course they were all html, that might be why... I do get html email 
> from lists, so it isn't just that.

SPAM filtering is a different issue, one dependent on the settings for your 
provider account and/or local client filters, not on the policies of the 
Google gmail service. If your set up is trapping gmail as spam, then you may 
need to look at correcting those filter settings.  To my knowledge, none of 
my gmail messages have ever been erroneously trapped by a confused spam 
filter. 

As for the HTML, gmail does allow users to compose messages with a
limited set of HTML formatting tags, but gmail's default composition is plain 
text and it always sends a plain text email along with  any HTML formatted 
portions. (And, as a weird aside, when I'm using Opera 8.5, the "rich" 
formatting option button on the compose window is totally missing.)

Again, my question is possible reasons that Google would have for disallowing 
.tar.gz attachments. Gmail has a generous 10 MB attachment / message size 
limit and it would be nice to be able to attach freely distributable, safe 
and legal linux packages without any hassles, trivial or otherwise. 

peace
aaron




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