Have you ever run into the email configuration that some network admins think aids security? This one: "you can't send me a zip/doc/exe file by email, you have to rename the file first"

This approach might add a little security if users hadn't spotted the obvious loophole of renaming the file, but instead it reinforces user belief that the admins are just there to be worked around, so it's a security, PR and policy failure.

Anyway cutting to the chase, I've been backing this site up to Gmail for quite a while using a variant of Gustaf's Gmail backup script. It's worked great, but it stopped working last week, it turns out that Gmail has started dropping tar.gz files just like it used to block zip and exe files, sorry Google, but that's evil!

Fortunately, a simple rename of the files worked fine, but Gmail's behaviour is just lame.