Skip to the content of the web site.

Email

Email Attachment Restrictions: admmail, ist, watserv1 and uwaterloo.ca main gateway mail

On December 17, 2003, IST implemented changes to our email servers to provide better protection against viruses and other attacks. Email will be scanned for potentially dangerous attachments.

Email containing attachments of the following filetypes will not be accepted by the email servers. The sender will be informed that this has happened, and in the case of legitimate attachments, can contact you to make other arrangements.

.ade,.adp
.bas,.bat,.bin,.btm
.chm,.cmd,.com,.cpl,.crt
.dll,.drv
.exe
.hlp,.hta
.inf,.ini,.ins,.isp
.je,.js,.jse
.lnk
.mdb,.mde,.msc,.msi,.msp,.mst
.pcd,.pif
.reg
.scr,.sct,.shb,.shs,.sys
.url
.vb,.vbe,.vbs,.vxd
.wsc,.wsf,.wsh

Additional files added January 28, 2004:

photos.zip
doc.zip
document.zip
myphoto.zip
test.zip
text.zip
message.zip
file.zip
readme.zip
data.zip
body.zip

Added October 27th, 2006:

"Content-Type: APPLICATION/OCTET-STREAM;" where the file is named docs.zip, pics.zip or Update-KB[0-8]*.zip

Large File Attachments

All large files will also be rejected. Since the maximum size of an acceptable file can vary from 10MB to 25MB depending on the current server situation, perhaps keeping the size under 10MB is best practice. Please try to use an alternate method to send/receive large files, such as file compression (zip filetypes are potentially a problem so specific zip files are noted in the above list, and this list may continue to grow), ftp, making available from your web site, or CD or network drives.

These changes have already been in place to the main campus email gateway since September 2003. All email from off-campus addressed to you in the form of userid@uwaterloo.ca is processed by this server.

If you have any questions, please contact the IST Helpdesk at ext. 84357.

Last updated by Pat Lafranier (pllafran at uwaterloo.ca) on February 21, 2007.