In connection with the WSC11 conference later this year in Phoenix, I sent an email [to a gmail address] this morning with my conference paper as a gzipped tar document, but it was immediately rejected with the following message
Our system detected an illegal attachment on your message. Please 552-5.7.0 visit http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6590 to 552 5.7.0 review our attachment guidelines.
Now, I understood illegal in the following sense (reproduced from wiktionary)
1. (law) Contrary to or forbidden by law, especially criminal law.
so I would like to understand which law (of which country) I broke by using the 4wsc11.tar.gz file… (I now realise that illegal has a broader sense in English than in French, since it also means breaking a rule. In French, illegal and unlawful are the same word.) However, I went and checked at the above google address and found the following
"ade", "adp", "bat", "chm", "cmd", "com", "cpl", "exe", "hta", "ins", "isp", "jse", "lib", "mde", "msc", "msp", "mst", "pif", "scr", "sct", "shb", "sys", "vb", "vbe", "vbs", "vxd", "wsc", "wsf", "wsh" Gmail won't accept these types of files even if they are sent in a zipped (.zip, .tar, .tgz, .taz, .z, .gz, .rar) format. If this type of message is sent to your Gmail address, it is bounced back to the sender automatically.
So the culprit is not the “tar.gz” extension but the fact that my file contains the letters wsc…! Unfortunate for the WSC conference!
