Tracking links and .exe files

[Anonymous]

We have a campaign that sends out a free trial email and within the email is a link to download our software.  That link has a .exe file extension.  Anytime we use tracking links (Not just Marketo, but other email programs), anyone using Internet Explorer has the .exe stripped off of the download.  It works fine in Chrome or Firefox.  For now, we've had to disable tracking on that link, but it's an important piece of information that we would like to be tracking.  Does anyone know how we could utilize the tracking links with our exe file and not have the extension stripped off?

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

You're running into the problem described here.

 I don't think you actually need to turn off tracking (mktNoTrack) but only turn off tokenizing (mktNoTok) -- that way, you can still track the Clicked Link in Email activity, but when the lead is redirected to your site for the download, there will be no extraneous query string.

That is, the problem isn't when the link gets rewritten to the branding domain as

http://pages.example.com/abcde
 

it's when the link bounces off your branding domain and is tokenized on its way to your real domain as
 

http://download.example.com/file.exe?_mkt_tok=12345

Whereas with mktNoTok, it will just be
 

http://download.example.com/file.exe

after the redirection.  That undecorated URL will be fine.