From: Pabst Blue Ribbon <pabst@blue.ribbon>

Virus Guy <Virus@Guy.C0M> wrote:
> I recently tried to send someone @ gmail a rar file as an attachment. 
> The file was about 10k.  It's a small (about 50 kb) xml file.  I used 
> winrar (offhand not sure what version I've got - there's no intuitive 
> way to see the version).  I used the password option and also encrypted 
> the file name.
> 
> Gmail said this:
> 
> ============
> Your message was rejected by gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com for the 
> following reason:
> 
> 5.7.0 This message was blocked because its content presents a potential
> 5.7.0 security issue. Please visit
> 5.7.0  https://support.google.com/mail/?p=BlockedMes... to review our
> 5.7.0 message content and attachment content guidelines.
> =============
> 
> So either
> 
> (a) gmail doesn't like password-protected rar files, or
> 
> (b) gmail does real-time file-cracking and looked inside the archive and 
> discovered an xml file and it has a policy of rejecting xml files as 
> attachments.

The latter is impossible. RAR format have quite good password protection
(unlike ZIP, for example.)

There is an option to not encrypt file names, only file content. If all
Google wants is to see file name and size it should work.

> Comments?

If you merge JPEG and RAR files (JPEG first, RAR second) then resulting
file will be recognized as JPEG by most programs, but will be correctly
unpacked by RAR.

--- NewsGate v1.0 gamma 2
 * Origin: News Gate @ Net396 -Huntsville, AL - USA (1:396/4)