Attachments

Using Thunderbird to send myself some files (an archive of sorts) but I
keep getting a message supposedly from GMail that it is having a problem
and will not send.

file.zip
file.pdf

so I renamed them but still it will not go.
e.g file.z or file.piz

AMess wrote:
Using Thunderbird to send myself some files (an archive of sorts) but I
keep getting a message supposedly from GMail that it is having a problem
and will not send.

file.zip
file.pdf

so I renamed them but still it will not go.
e.g file.z or file.piz

You want to be absolutely sure what the "having a problem"
actually is, before dealing with it.

It probably isn't the size of the attachment.

"Gmail Increases File Attachment Size Limit to 50MB"

https://www.pcmag.com/news/352131/gm...-limit-to-50mb

Google may be trying to prevent the transmission
of EXE content, which could potentially have malware.
That's the only excuse for blocking ZIP files
I can think of. And that would also depend on them
receiving and analyzing the file, to decide it
should be rejected. That doesn't seem likely.

A PDF should not be a problem, in terms of malware.
A PDF can contain a Javascript exploit, but as long
as you turn of Javascript in the Adobe Reader preferences,
that shouldn't hurt anything.

*******

Now, this is a novel explanation.

http://ccm.net/forum/affich-76425-i-...files-in-gmail

"You want to know what worked for me?

I shrunk down my browser window (which was firefox
by the way) and there it was, gmails attach file
window open and waiting for me to pick a file on
my hard drive for it.

How on earth it wound up behind my browser window
"

But that's not Thunderbird. In your case, you're attempting
to upload an attachment via IMAP. Which isn't quite the
same thing. There should be a difference between
pop-up blocking for HTML code, versus Thunderbird making
a dialog box for attachments to work properly.

*******

The only other thing I can think of, is a "black hole
routing" problem. That's where a short text message
makes it to an email server, but large attachments
deadlock. Normally, the email tool cannot even throw
up an error, unless the email tool uses a timer to
detect a TCP deadlock. One of the ingredients there,
would be if you tried to "ping" the IP address of the
server you're sending to, ping is rejected and doesn't
work (none of the launched ping packets come back).
The more modern Windows may also have some
protection in protocol, for detecting black hole
routing problems. Changing the MTU on your router
can also be used to fix the problem with the
particular email server. That's what the tech support
at my ISP tried to tell me, that it was "all my fault"
their email didn't work :-\ Blame shifting bozos.

You could potentially detect a black hole problem,
using Wireshark, and noticing that only 1K worth of
uploads for the attachment happened, before it
seemed to stop dead. Since you're probably using
SSL or TLS for the transmission, it's going to be
harder to draw such a conclusion for modern protocols.
It'll still stop dead, but you'll have a harder time
deciding what was in the packets.

OK, so your next experiment, is to make a 512 byte
attachment, and try and upload that :-) See if
there is a size dependency. See what size triggers it.

Paul

AMess,

so I renamed them but still it will not go.

There are scanning programs will ignore the files extension and try to
determine the type of file by way of the *contents* of the file. The files
you mention start with a rather recognisable pattern (the so-called file
ID).

Have you already tried to attach a simple text document and/or an image ?

And last-but-not-least:
When you get an actual error message than please mention its exact contents.
Such messages mostly contain a pointer to the cause of the failure.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser