Today was generally sucky, and Outlook/GMail didn't help any.

Something I noticed newly today in Outlook 2007 (as opposed to a problem I've been having forever with GMail, which I, umm, actually use) is that it blocked executable ("*.exe") attachments. You can see that the person tried to send you an attachment, but all you get is an error message saying the file was blocked. I searched around for a bit but couldn't find any way to override Outlook's opinion and open my file. I'm pretty sure this behavior existed in Outlook 2003 (and maybe even versions older than 2003) but I don't use Outlook often and I attach exe files even less, so today evening was the first time I noticed the behavior.

The easy way to solve this: zip the file.

The hard way: modify the registery. I haven't tried this method and don't care to; as usual, people with heart conditions should stay clear of modifying the registry.

Google one-ups Outlook in suckiness when it comes to blanket-banning exe files. Yes, it's true that executables are high-risk, etc., but that doesn't make me feel any better when I have to send an exe file to someone or, more often the case, when I want to, say, backup a C# console program I wrote. I'd have to remove all instances of exe files before I can save the zipped solution folder.

Anyway: Google is slightly more sophisticated than Outlook in the sense that it searches zipped folders for executables, too. But changing the extension of the file to something benign (say ".bak" or ".txt" or ".stupid-gmail") does the trick. Of course, you should make sure to tell the recipient to get rid of the extra extension.

Side note: another frustration with Google is that it uploads the whole file before giving me error messages! 10MB, or something like that, is the limit for attachment size, but Google actually uploads the attachment (as far as I can tell) before telling me that the attachment size exceeded the maximum limit?!?

Urgh!

To end with a positive note:

What's the best part of Word 2007? The fact that it doesn't litter your desktop with 10,000 "hidden" files. Go on. Take a look.

Read comment #2 to modify Outlook's "bad attachment" actions!