It’s amazing to see stuff that get quarantined from email—in a corporate environment. A 5MB limit on attachments is ridiculous, and yet, we have no choice but to live with it. Someone sends my colleague a set of files; because it’s too large to come in—in one shot. He splits them, and then sends a batch file together with the zipped files. The spanned files come through, but the key batch file—which can join the file spans—is quarantined. The mail server filter, it seems, does not like files with .bat extensions. What do you do?

My colleague asks me—while trying to get hold of the sender whose timezone has crossed office hours. I take a guess; think it’s a portable document format (PDF) file—what else can a report be in—these days? I dump the spanned files (file_1of2 and file_2of2) in a folder, and run the following on a prompt.

copy /b file_1of2 + file_2of2 thecompletefile.pdf

We now have the complete report.

Of course, there are other ways of beating the dumb system. You could ask the sender to send the contents of the batch file as plain text; rename the binary file as .txt with an instruction to rename to .pdf after download¹; or send the binary uuencoded²—which is in text, but would again exceed the size limit. Or simply what I did above.

1. Gmail is intelligent though, it can sniff a binary file—even if it’s renamed with a .txt extension. [←]
2. Works best for small binary files. [←]

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