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Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

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71–80 of 97 posts

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#71
post #49

So can we use that to send binaries to people? Because gmail will absolutely not allow you do that. They will go as far as inspecting archives to look for binaries and ban you from sending them.

You can get around this by renaming the file to have some arbitrary image extension. Not ideal, but works.

IIRC, you can also just strip the file extension altogether.

I had to send some DLLs once -- that was a pain. I think the only thing that ended up working was zipping them and stripping the .zip extension off the file.

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#72
post #59

So, in other words, Gmail just added a feature that Hotmail/Outlook.com have had for years. golf clapping

yes. Exactly... But, you know, now it's done by Google... Anyway, I'm surprised that no-one except you cited skydrive and the fact that they just copied a feature so old for many users...

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#73
post #15

Totally off topic but blogspot is just awful. Why does everything have to be a complicated buggy JavaScript app? There's nothing wrong with serving up good ol HTML pages, especially for simple text and images content like a blog.

In a discussion about this at work a few months back, someone suggested to me that part of Google's motivation might be to increase the cost of entry for search competitors. No longer can you just scrape a page and index it: not one of the 22 KB served at that URL actually contains the text of the page. To scrape one of those awful pages, you need to JavaScript interpreter and a DOM - a headless browser, really. Unle…

Getting a headless browser up and running really isn't that huge of a hurdle if you're capable enough to build a search engine whose intent is to be competitive with Google.

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't scroll down with the space bar. This makes me unreasonably angry.

Pff … just use your mouse to scroll! /me moves cursor over to the scroll bar only to be intercepted by a pop-up menu containing a logo, helpfully labelled "Logo". Oh.

Logo

wtf

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#75
post #15

Totally off topic but blogspot is just awful. Why does everything have to be a complicated buggy JavaScript app? There's nothing wrong with serving up good ol HTML pages, especially for simple text and images content like a blog.

In a discussion about this at work a few months back, someone suggested to me that part of Google's motivation might be to increase the cost of entry for search competitors. No longer can you just scrape a page and index it: not one of the 22 KB served at that URL actually contains the text of the page. To scrape one of those awful pages, you need to JavaScript interpreter and a DOM - a headless browser, really. Unle…

You can read the entire blog from the RSS feed. Can't say that about Google+, though.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/OfficialGmailBlog

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#77
post #15

Totally off topic but blogspot is just awful. Why does everything have to be a complicated buggy JavaScript app? There's nothing wrong with serving up good ol HTML pages, especially for simple text and images content like a blog.

Yeah, it works okay for people who are browsing it on a decent machine with an up to date browser and gives everything else problems. All for little to no gain in functionality, all we really want is a title and some text nicely formatted with a decent font (and these can be easily fixed with readability/ instapaper anyway).

Seems like the wrong direction in an increasingly mobile world, feels like this stuff is either tested on very specific mobile devices or not at all.

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#78
post #49

So can we use that to send binaries to people? Because gmail will absolutely not allow you do that. They will go as far as inspecting archives to look for binaries and ban you from sending them.

You can get around this by renaming the file to have some arbitrary image extension. Not ideal, but works.

That is true.

I wanted to email my tax data to my accountant. So, I made a self-extracting PGP archive several megabytes in size. Gmail wouldn't let me send it until I tacked on .remove after the .exe extension.

It's not really an unreasonable thing, IMO. Google is just making sure the file won't run semi-automatically upon being downloaded. Ending in a random extension prevents that, since the user has to deliberately rename the file first.

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#79
post #15

Totally off topic but blogspot is just awful. Why does everything have to be a complicated buggy JavaScript app? There's nothing wrong with serving up good ol HTML pages, especially for simple text and images content like a blog.

I despise this new trend, and it kills me that Google seems to be embracing it more and more. Google Groups is the worst offender for me - it completely breaks my browser's keybindings for going backwards, so every time I'm, eg. searching Googling a bug and open a mailing list archive to find an answer to a bug, I inevitably end up collapsing the thread each and every time, when what I really want is just to go back…

Funny thing is that the "new and better" Google Groups don't work for me on any Android browser on my tablet, at all.

Why make a website and not test it on your own ecosystem? Sometimes I don't get Google.

Re: Gmail and Drive - a new way to send files

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't scroll down with the space bar. This makes me unreasonably angry.

Pff … just use your mouse to scroll! /me moves cursor over to the scroll bar only to be intercepted by a pop-up menu containing a logo, helpfully labelled "Logo". Oh.

What's better - if you click on it, you see just that.

A blogger logo. That's it. That's where the link leads. To blogger logo.

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