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I intentionally saved something very sensitive among a lengthy text file named xxxx.dll and saved as an attachment in my Gmail inbox as an email. Now that I needed it and tried to download it, Gmail simply gave me a blank web page saying 'Virus found'.

What do I do now to get my file back? It's very important!

Even ironier was I used 'xxxx trojan horse' as the subject of that email. I thought I was so clever but eventually turned out so stupid! HELP ME!

P.S. Already tried to send the email to another of my email that probably isn't so strict in the security policy but it kept failing to send as Gmail seemed to be detecting it and refused to send!

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  • (random guess—haven't tested this) if you enable IMAP access, can you download it that way? If so, please steal my idea and post it as an answer.
    – derobert
    Sep 9, 2015 at 17:18

1 Answer 1

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Good news - your data is still there, but you're going to have to jump through some hoops to get it back.

  1. Open the email in Gmail, click on the arrow in the top-right corner of the email and choose "Show Original"

enter image description here

  1. Somewhere in your email you're going to see a section that looks like this, followed by a wall of encoded text:

enter image description here enter image description here

  1. Copy all of that text (not including the headers) into your clipboard (Ctrl+C or Cmd+C)

  2. Head on over to https://www.base64decode.org/ and paste the text that you copied into there (Ctrl+V or Cmd+V), and press "Decode"

  3. Your original text will appear in the "Result goes here" box

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  • This seems the way to go. But I'm only saving the email as a draft and never sent it anywhere. When I click open the draft, there's no drop down menu nor 'Show original' at all. Is there any solution to my special situation here?
    – datasn.io
    Sep 8, 2015 at 11:42
  • @kavoir.com didn't realise it was saved as a draft. Probably not much you really can do then...
    – Mark Henderson
    Sep 8, 2015 at 12:12

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