HELP! Can't mail a ZIP file.

For some reason, my Mac Mail has decided to not let me mail a ZIP file. Last Night the mail was sent to the recipient, with a blurb that the file may contain a ZIP BOMB, and was detatched. Now it won't even try and send a ZIP file. Is there something I should know about, thanks.

G5, Mac OS X (10.4.3)

Posted on Dec 15, 2005 12:34 PM

Reply
4 replies

Dec 15, 2005 12:49 PM in response to David Walker7

Could you provide some additional information please? Are you sending it as an attachment using the built in Mail program? Do you get some sort of error message? If so what does it say? Have you contacted your ISP? What do you mean "it won't even try?"

Maybe the words ZIP BOMB made them flag your account and not allow you to send attachments. If I was running the mail server and saw that I might be inclined to reduce your mail services until I figured out what the heck you were sending!! 😉

I posted this before I realized there was another post about it. Same question asked there ie error messages.

Message was edited by: Al Van Malsen

Dec 15, 2005 8:59 PM in response to Allan Sampson

Sorry about that, noticed this area of the discussion gets more hits. This is what was in the email.

The attachment sfstemplate.psd with this email was found to contain the
Suspected ZIP Bomb detected by BMI (message not filtered for viruses) virus
and could not be disinfected. The attachment has been removed from the
email. Please ask the sender to repair and resend it.

This message has been processed by Brightmail(TM) Anti-Virus using
Symantec's Norton AntiVirus Technology.

When I say won't even try, I mean Mac Mail won't send the file with the ZIP attached.

thanks.

dave

Dec 16, 2005 6:06 AM in response to David Walker7

You appear to be quoting a notification from the recipients mail server to the recipient, not a message from your ISP or mail client. Is that correct?

From an anti-virus web site, dated Jan 2005:

"Some forms of malicious file that are designed to disrupt the action of anti-virus scanners. These files,sometimes referred to as "zip bombs", usually take the form of innocent looking archive files that, when unpacked in order to be scanned, require enormous amounts of time, disk space, or memory."

Brightmail appears to be a corporate level anti-spam program
http://www.brightmail.com/ owned by symantec.

Mail server level AV software can be configured to disallow/strip attachments with user specified attachments. It is also configurable to open zip files and scan the content.

For example, my employer disallows zip, exe, mdb, hqx, and a large number of other formats.
Perhaps you can rename the file to (whatever.123) - in the message proper, advise the recipient to rename the file to whatever.zip. May also consider renaming the PSD to something other than template.

How large is the file? That may also be an issue, given the note above talks about large amount of time to unpack and scan...

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HELP! Can't mail a ZIP file.

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