I wanted to send an executable (.exe) file as email attachment from Gmail to a friend of mine who also has Gmail. Unfortunately, it is not letting me upload this executable file. I also cannot send this file when I compress it as a zip. I learnt that Gmail does not allow exe files. Can you help?
Akshay
Gmail will not let you send and receive executable files as email attachments. Google does this to protect their servers and, I suppose, the users’ computer. And, yes, even if you cloak it as a compressed zip file, the .exe will still not be uploaded on Gmail. But I could manage to do this successfully!
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Before I describe my little experiment by which I was able to send a 2.5MB executable file as an email attachment through Gmail, I should tell you an alternate way to do this. Simply upload the file on your own server or one of the free file hosting sites (if they allow). You can then forward the URL to the recipient. But if you aren’t satisfied with this and want the real deal… here is how it is.
How did I send an executable file over Gmail as an email attachment?
I started with a 2.5MB exe file. This was a small setup file of a program I had downloaded from the web. As you can see, the file size was way below the Gmail email attachment size limit.
My assumption that Gmail is recognizing an executable file by its file extension worked! Thus, knowing that the executable file will be rejected (it had a .exe extension), I simply changed that!
Read how to change the file extension in Windows 7 if your computer is running that operating system; a similar logic will work for older versions of Windows O.S. People who know a little DOS can use the RENAME command via the terminal window (command prompt) and accomplish the same. The format of RENAME is:
> rename OLD-FILE-NAME NEW-FILE-NAME
FYI, you can also use ren instead of rename. Generally, you would just substitute the .exe file extension to something like .doc – this is what I did.
You can then upload and send the executable file as an email attachment via Gmail. And do remember to instruct the recipient to change the file extension back to exe!
