Alternative to Zip for shrinking email attachments
 

I'm having more and more situations where a zip file gets eaten by the recipients spam filter with no notification to sender or recipient.
I've tried renaming the .zip suffix to something else but that has mixed results.
Basically need to shrink an attachment to a reasonable size or in some cases attach many files so the Zip file was a "container".
Alternatives?
It also needs to be something that is easily handled by the recipient....Zip was nice since Windows Exploder now handles zip files.

Windows is unreliable about handling .zip files. A few years back after a catastrophic laptop failure I burned a whole bunch of stuff to CD's as I didn't have time to install it to the replacement laptop. I had a whole bunch of zip files in the stuff I burned, I forgot to burn anything that could extract them. Oops--something like 50% corrupt. They would have been nice to have but weren't essential, I was simply annoyed. Later I did put proper tools on the machine--and all of a sudden those corrupt zip files weren't corrupt anymore.


As for your problem, though, I don't see a good solution. Anything that will scan into a zip file will scan into any of theh common compression systems.

WinRAR is an alternative to ZIP.

Use a free service like sendthisfile.com

We pretty much ban all compressed files because the people here are too stupid to not just run them when they come in, and we don't want them doing that.

Another option is to ftp them someplace so they can download them.

A very good alternative, too. Unfortunately, the RAR archive format isn't anywhere near as pervasive as the Zip format.

A couple of weeks ago, RARLab gave a free license for WinRAR to anyone who managed to get to the signup page on a designated day. Given the apparent volume (the site was severely hammered for most of that day), it's a bit more pervasive than it used to be :D

>Alternatives?

I think as time goes on more and more corporate spam / antivirus policies are going to make email attachments harder and harder to send. Most good software looks 'inside' attachments so I'm not sure if a different packager will help much - It might in the short term.

I would look into an FTP or HTTP site where you can host the files. Then all you need to do is email out a link to the file.

I would still zip them up so they don't open up in the end-user's browser once they receive the link.

Cheers,
Geoff Glave
Vancouver, Canada

Some email spam check systems can be fooled by renaming the attachment whatever.pleaserenamebacktozip (or any innocuous extension). Recipient needs to know to rename it when they save it of course.

For sending, you can try free web-based sending (mentioned above) instead which won't care about the .zip Examples: http://www.sendthisfile.com/ http://www.yousendit.com/

That said, if it's the spam filter that's killing you (and not the virus filter), then this may not help. Spam filters are getting more aggressive. We've had some problems receiving recently with our existing mail service after they made the spam filtering more aggressive.

Usually attachments as long as they're from some otherwise legitimate source are skewered by rules that are designed to catch viruses and not by the spam filter. The free sending will fix that. Sends a plain email with link to the file.

Oh, in case it helps, very common virus filtering is to kill anything with two file extensions, so if you are zipping one file called abcxyz.doc and your resulting file is abcxyz.doc.zip it will be flagged as suspicious by many anti-virus schemes. If that's what you're doing, you can easily fix it by making your .zip file have only the .zip extension. (Once it is unzipped, it will have the proper extension.)

It's not really common, but I like the 7-Zip format (typically .7z). I find it's generally fast and more compact than the older Zip formats. The 7-Zip utility also handles a number of other formats, including gzip, tar, rar, etc.

(Note: Not at all affiliated with the 7-Zip project, just a happy user)

Yahoo! Briefcase
 

Try putting the file in Yahoo! Briefcase and allow others to get to that folder.

http://briefcase.yahoo.com/bc//home

Note: I haven't been there in ages. I just signed in and saw that you have to pay to be able to share files there. Still an option though.

I could give you a list of compression formats, but not sure what good it will do you.

I'm pretty sure that winzip understands these file formats:

bzip2 (.bz2)
gzipped tar archive (.tgz)

-David

Try password protecting the zip and putting a simple password in the body of the email message. Most anti-spam solutions will allow password protected zips through.