Google Drive using wrong and weird icons for various file types

Question

I uploaded an .exe file (of a game) to my Google Drive, and noticed a strange icon used for it:

What does this icon mean? Looks like email with play button... but can't see how it's related to .exe file or even the game itself in case Google somehow sniffed the contents of the file.

I took a look in Google Drive icons and buttons but didn't see that icon in there.

On a different Google account I have (used for work), there is a different icon for old .exe files:

But when uploading the same .exe as above, I see the same icon.

What's going on? How Google decide which icon to assign, and do they have any special meaning, e.g. permissions?

I also uploaded .rdp (Remote Desktop connection file) and it's even worse, Google Drive thinks it's an audio file:

Double clicking it makes it try to play as audio, which of course fails. I didn't find anywhere how .rdp can be audio file.

Answer 1

TL;DR: The icons represent the file type, recognized by its mime-type, extension, and encoding.

Detailed explanation:

The green envelope icon no longer occur ⁽¹⁾, so about the others - lets go:

What's going on? How Google decide which icon to assign, and do they have any special meaning, e.g. permissions?

• Google decides what the icon will be by its extension, encoding, and mime-type.

  • Icons examples by mime-type (recognized by Google Drive [from the html source]):
    • application/octet-stream .
    • application/x-msdownload .
    • application/x-dosexec .
  • x-dosexec is a subtype of x-msdownload. The former is used specifically to .exe files, where the latter includes: exe, dll, com, bat, msi (source).

• The meaning is their recognized mime-type, nothing to do with permissions.

I also uploaded .rdp (Remote Desktop connection file) and it's even worse, Google Drive thinks it's an audio file

• In that case, the encoding of the rdp file created by the Remote Desktop Connection utility is (according to notepad++) UCS-2 LE BOM.

  • UCS-2 LE BOM explanation: UTF-16 extends UCS-2, in Little endian (=LE), and with BOM.
    
    

  It seems that there was a confusion by the browser or Google Drive in interpreting the encoding, which led Google Drive think it's an audio file.

• For example, here's the difference in hex between this encoding (left) to ANSI (right):

  

⁽¹⁾ From previous tests, it seems that the green envelope icon was replaced by this icon: .

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The old answer is partial and doesn't really explains much.
It's kept here is a comment (choose edit to watch).