technical question (for PC gurus out there)

[der_kluge]

Well, that subject line should attract a lot of attention....


Anyway, I have a quandry.

At work, I don't have internet access yet, and they lock things down really, really tightly. Well, it's a financial institution, so I guess they're justified in that regard.

So, my goal is that I want to email myself a file to my work address. This file is a .pdf and it's about 8.5 megabytes. It's the HARP .pdf in case anyone cares.

So, I know my email at work accepts such things since I emailed a smaller .pdf (about 2 megs) a couple of weeks ago without any difficulty.

So, I send this .pdf from my gmail account, and then I get a return receipt stating that the file is too large (Greater than 10000000), which confuses me since the file isn't greater than 10 megabytes.

So, I figure I'd just compress it into smaller volumes with winzip.

Well, that's no dice either since my email at work refuses anything with a .zip or .z01, etc, extension. So those all got refused by my work's mailer demon.

So, my last course of action is just to split the file in half.

I want to retain it as a .pdf, but just split it into two halfs, and then somehow join them back together again at work.

And no, I don't have LINUX on my machine at home.

Any suggestions?

 

[Greylock]

Don't use company property on company time for personal reasons? That occurs to me...

Other than that, download your file to a common website, find an company acceptable website with a Google search, find said afore-mentioned website and said file, and wait for the Tech guys to show up with the HR ghouls in tow.

 

[RuminDange]

Better yet, if you have a CD drive at work, burn it to a Cd-RW and carry it in. That way it leaves no trail on the email servers. Even if you recieve it and delete it, there is a strong chance it was backed up prior to you getting it on your workstation.
Of course most employers frown on using company resources for non-company reasons, and leaving an email trail can get you in trouble. Had a friend fired from a nice job because of a non-related email sent 6 months prior to them cutting him loose. A manager of another department got a bug and starting looking for anything to get rid of him even though everyone else liked him. Always best to CYA.

RD

 

[Duncan Haldane]

burning it to CD is a reasonable option, but I'm guessing that's locked down on your machine, too.

If your email bounces anything with a zip tag, why don't you :
winzip the file into smaller components
rename the files to something else (eg *.txt)
email them.
receive them at work
rename them to .zip
unzip them.

HTH

Duncan

 

[tarchon]

Email uses an encoding scheme that enlarges an attached file by about 33%. Zip won't directly help because the PDF format already uses a highly efficient compression scheme; however it is possible with some archiving tools to split a file into two parts, which can be reassembled later.
Personally, if I thought my employer was really touchy about that kind of thing (which mine isn't), I'd go spend the $5 to do it at an internet cafe or a computer game parlor.

 

[der_kluge]

Good grief, I never even thought about burning it to a CD. And here I bought the freaking CD burner, and haven't even used it yet. Guess that's why it didn't occur to me.

Apparently you guys that are squeamish about doing personal stuff at work don't work in the corporate world. I'm not busy 100% of the time, and I do have lunch breaks, so I can read whatever the heck I want to legitimately during those times.

And I think renaming them to something like .txt doesn't work, because a co-worker mentioned that they used to do that internally to get around it, but now that doesn't work - the systems look for header information internally to the file.

 

[GlassJaw]

Apparently you guys that are squeamish about doing personal stuff at work don't work

Cowards!!

Another option is to get a USB Flash Drive. Those things rule. A guy here at work has one and I plan on getting one ASAP. You can get them up to 1 GB (bigger than a CD) and it's about the size of an eraser.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

If you can go online normal most the time and are allowed to upload files to other servers, you could use a webmail account and sent it with the webmail service.

 

[RuminDange]

Cowards!!

Another option is to get a USB Flash Drive. Those things rule. A guy here at work has one and I plan on getting one ASAP. You can get them up to 1 GB (bigger than a CD) and it's about the size of an eraser.

No kidding love those things! Got 3 myself...16MB,256MB and a 512MB. Comes in real handy all the time. But I used to use CD-RW's until I got the flash drives. You just normally have to watch using them on systems where adminstration is afraid of you copying information. As these things are detected as harddrives and the system may let you connect them but refuse to let you disconnect them properly without Adminstrator rights. Plus they can leave a audit trail as well. If they allow you play a CD for music and you don't have a burner normally they won't audit that, but they can lock out the use of the CD Drive to keep users from installing software. Just depends on how paraniod the business is about you bringing or taking stuff to and from work.

As far as doing things from work, do it all the time. Otherwise I wouldn't be here during business hours.
I just use Remote desktop to connect to home, browse from the home machine and work therefore can have no tracking of what I browse except those things I browse on the workstation which normally is all related to work, except for reading the news and few web comics, first thing in the morning. After 8+ years at a previous job where you couldn't do anything without being tracked or questioned, you learn to CYA.

RD

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

Speaking for myself (and I am responsible for several corporate email systems), the 10MB limit is (a) very common, and (b) has more to do with system resources than preventing people from emailing themselves data files (executables are another story).

Every place I support is absolutely dreadful about deleting crap from their email box. I did an Exchange upgrade last weekend, and some woman had over 400MB of stuff in her 'Deleted Items' folder that she'd never purged. It's always nice to see that when you're there at midnight waiting for it to finish copying. And they would scream bloody murder if we tried to implement a retention policy.

And here's my public service announcement for the day. All of you out there working in an office using Outlook and Exchange: the standard version of Exchange is limited to a single 16GB database, so when your system administrator starts getting on you about having over a gig of email, think about how much of the corporate email system is dedicated those .MP3 files you just had to have at the office.....

Sorry. I'm just tired after working 30 hours Sat and Sun after a normal 40 during the week.