How To Send Exe Files in Gmail

Posted on 16. Jul, 2009 by Bryan.Castleberry in Miscellaneous

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envelopeIsn’t email great? Beaming messages and files all over the globe in a matter of minutes has always seemed pretty cool to me. But what about when you want to send an attachment that GMail (my email provider of choice) or any other email provider doesn’t like?

The Error

I was trying to send a program to a friend the other day, and when I uploaded my attachment and tried to send my message, I was greeted with this.

Picture 1

Let’s see…how could I get around this?  I’ll put it in a zip file! They’ll never even know it’s there…

Picture 2

Now, I’m getting irritated.

The Answer

The solution to this came to me from one of my professors when he asked me to send him a program I’d written for a class: change the extension of the file! For instance, you could change the name from the_program.exe to the_program.stuff or something. If the email provider sees a file that has an extension it doesn’t recognize, it won’t know you’re trying to send a program (or whatever it is they don’t want you to send) and it should go through with no problems. You’ll just want to add a note to your message to change the extension back to what it was originally.

If you can’t see file extensions, you can unhide them by going into any folder (My Documents will work), clicking on the tools menu and then folder options at the bottom. In the middle tab, you’ll find a checkbox that says “Hide extensions for known file types.” Uncheck that and you’re golden.

By Bryan Castleberry

Image by Tim Morgan

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5 Responses to “How To Send Exe Files in Gmail”

  1. Squealing Rat

    16. Jul, 2009

    Nice article! Here is an easier way to do it if you are just sending it to yourself:

    Simple attach the file to an email message and press save. Now, you have saved that file as a draft to your Gmail account. No errors, no renaming!

    Reply to this comment

  2. anon

    16. Jul, 2009

    OR.. you could just password protect the zip and send the password in the email body.. then gmail wont care whats in the zip

    Reply to this comment

  3. Send Exe Files As Attachments In Gmail

    18. Jul, 2009

    [...] first way according to Lost In Technology is to rename the file to something else and then attach it to email, this works good [...]

    Reply to this comment

  4. Tech-Freak Stuff

    26. Jul, 2009

    I always thought that Email services regard EXE files as Viruses. Good that RAR is not yet included in their algorithm. Good work!

    This comment was originally posted on http://techie-buzz.com/)“>Techie Buzz, know your technology head on

    Reply to this comment

  5. Release Candidate

    26. Jul, 2009

    I think it is always better to convert the Executable file into RAR or GZ. These extensions are not mentioned in the algorithms of Email providers so we can exploit this!

    Reply to this comment

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