Ah, IT departments. The evil rival of communication professionals. The primary breeding ground for nerdy control freaks.
But I digress...
Disabling right click in the email programs? Seriously? Oh good grief.
Assuming that the installation of Firefox (with the NoScript plugin) is not possible -- which would disable the click-blocking javascript -- then you'll need to resort to manipulation of the files, as you've correctly surmised.
Renaming the extension, as you've mentioned, is the common easy fix. However, since Windows has decided people are too stupid to be allowed to see extensions by default, this generally doesn't work. (As an alternative, you could also instruct recipients on the method to show extensions in Windows. But, of course, that comes tied to the ability to make changes within Windows, which may or may not be blocked by a control freak IT admin.)
The last easy solution is to
put the video file inside of a ZIP file. Windows and Mac OS X come with native abilities to unzip files, so this is likely the most viable solution. (Personally, I prefer RAR files, but that would add a layer of complication to non-savvy computer users. Best to stick with ZIP.)
Because MIME types are handled on the user end computer, the computer gets to decide how to open/save/etc the file. There's nothing you can add to an URL that would force downloading if the computer has already decided WMV = open/play with Windows Media Player (which is the default setting on Windows). So that's going to be a dead end for you.
Another option could be to simply avoid the corporate webmail.
Send it to their personal GMail/Yahoo/etc, which would have none of those silly problems. Assuming those sites are not blocked.
Maybe even
put it on your own server, and create a "
Right-Click Here and Save As (or Save Target As)" link on a basic webpage*. That should be right-clickable.
And again, I feel your pain. I actually use to take a great bit of joy out of making IT VPs look like fools in front of others. For all their pay and training, so many of them appear to be out of touch with how normal people actually use computers and the internet at any given moment. It was a constant source of nuisance to have to work within their ridiculous confines.
Let me know what works for you.
* Code for a basic page:
HTML Code:
<html><body><center>
<br /><br /><br /><br />
<font face="Tahoma" size="4">
<a href="http://www.mysite.com/clientfolder/videofile.wmv">Right-Click Here and Save As (or Save Target As)</a>
</font>
<br /><br /><br /><br />
</center></body></html>
