The ATF explosives examiner for Idaho said I could just email the scans of the copies I kept. But after two days of getting neither confirmation or bounced email messages about the "Employee Possessor Questionnaires" (background check paperwork for handling explosives) I was about to call him when he emailed me. He said he hadn't received any emails from me after the first one. I had actually sent him two emails in that time frame. The first had bounced and I presumed it was because the attachment was too large. So I put the 9 Mbyte .ZIP file on the boomershoot.org website (the .ZIP file has now been deleted and my logs indicate only I had attempted to download it) and sent him a link to that. That email did not bounce.
But I noticed something, the email address he used was different than the one I had originally used to contact him. I originally used <something>@atf.gov and the one he responded with was <somethingelse>@usdoj.gov. So I sent the same two emails again. One with the attachment and one with the link. Then a couple hours ago I called him. He hadn't received anything.
We verified the email addresses. The first one (which, on Tuesday, made it through to him) was wrong. The other, which I had done a "reply to" from his email was the correct one. He would not download a file from a website ("We don't do that"). Okay, so I'll try sending a plain text test message from a different email account to his preferred email address. That worked. Okay, now the 9 Mbyte .ZIP file. He's not sure what a .ZIP file is. He knows about .PDF files. .JPG files? Yeah, kinda.
The 9 Mbyte .ZIP bounced. The message:
The original message was received at Thu, 05 Mar 2009 12:15:40 -0800
----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors ----- "somethingelse@usdoj.gov"
----- Transcript of session follows ----- .. while talking to mailsc20.usdoj.gov
>>> DATA <<< 550 5.7.0 Maximum Attachment Size (12M) Violation
Yeah, my 9 Mbyte .ZIP file exceeded their maximum attachment size restriction of 12 M.
Maybe this is a test to see if I'm calm enough to be trusted with explosives.
I broke the 9 Mbyte file into five .ZIP files the largest being 1.95 Mbytes and sent them as attachments to five plain text emails from my alternate email address to his second email address.
About 15 minutes later he called back. He had received them but it was going to "take a while" to get them from "picture viewer" to the printer. He would start work on that the first thing in the morning.
Apparently I passed the test.
I'm going out to the Boomershoot site this weekend. I think I need to blow something up.