I’m a pretty detail-oriented guy, but the number of times I’ve sent an email message without the attachment I referred to is unnerving. A while ago I had the idea that if my email program could scan for the word “attachment,” and an attachment wasn’t present, it could show an alert before letting me send the message to confirm whether I meant to include one. I decided to try and write an AppleScript plug-in for Entourage, my email program at the time, and put it on my low-priority to do list.

Before I had time to do that, I switched from Entourage to Thunderbird, and was delighted to find that such a plug-in already exists. I tried it and it worked exactly as I had imagined:

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/attachreminder

Then I switched from Thunderbird to Apple Mail, and found a plug-in for that, too:

http://eaganj.free.fr/code/mail-plugin

I haven’t used them, but it looks like similar plug-ins are available for Gmail and Outlook:

http://www.techsuperb.com/email/forgotten-attachment-detectors-for-gmail-and-outlook/1536.html

I’m afraid that still leaves Entourage without a similar feature, but it won’t be me who builds it — I’m happy with my new mail setup.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 12:16 am and is filed under Computer Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.