Gmail's forgotten attachment detector 18 Sep 2008

Back in July 2007, we reported on Mark Dredze, John Blitzer and Fernando Pereira's attempts to solve a problem that you're no doubt all too familiar with: the forgotten email attachment. (We've all been there: You send an email to a group of people asking them to "take a look at the attached" but subsequently forget to add the attachment before you send the message...thereby generating a wave of replies from the recipients notifying you of your mistake. D'oh!). To resolve this problem Dredze et al. proposed an intelligent system that would inspect outbound email messages for words like "attached" or "attaching" and, if one or more instances of these words were found, would check to see that an attachment had been included. If not, it would stop the email from being sent and alert the user to his or her mistake.

"What a great idea!", we thought. However since since 2007, we've heard nothing more about it...until Tuesday, when Google (Gmail) Labs added it to Gmail!

Google's version is pretty basic - it detects patterns like "I've attached..." and "I have attached", but not "I attached a file" or "Check the attached file" - however, that's probably because it's still in beta. No doubt these glitches will be weeded out by the time the next version arrives. (Note: If you're looking for something more robust in the meantime, you could do worse than implement this Greasemonkey script).

See also: Gmail addresses gone completely dotty.