Tech Geek

If I've done it once, I've done it a thousand times; meant to send an e-mail to someone that had an attachment attached, but forgot to actually hit the paperclip to attach the attachment. Sometimes I catch it myself and send a second e-mail right away, but other times the recipient or, even worse, recipients, have to e-mail me back and tell me that I forgot to send them the attachment that I neglected to attach. It's annoying to them and makes me feel like a real dunce. I'm guessing that at least some of you can relate, having sent the same, shall we say, detached e-mails.

So I was excited to notice a new feature in the Gmail Labs a few weeks ago. Forgotten Attachment Detector by Jonathan K which prevents you from accidentally sending messages without the relevant attachments. Prompts you if you mention attaching a file, but forgot to do so. If you use Gmail, sign-in to your account and click the Settings link at the top right of your screen and then click the Labs tab. Scroll down to Forgotten Attachment Detector and click the Enable button. Now if you indicate in your e-mail that you're going to attach a file, but you haven't actually attached it, you'll get a pop-up window asking if you really mean to send the e-mail without the attachment.

For those that use Thunderbird to manage their e-mail, there is a similar extension called Attachment Reminder which scans your outgoing e-mails for certain keywords and asks if you really mean to send them without attachments if any of those keywords are present.

I would imagine that there are similar tools for Outlook, Outlook Express, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail and other e-mail services that I haven't used as much. If you know of an attachment reminder for one of them, please post it in the comments section below and help others avoid sending e-mails without their accompanying attachments.

Bonus Gmail tip: Add the dragdropupload extension to Firefox and you can drag your e-mail attachments onto the screen without having to browse for them!