Detect missing attachments in Gmail
Interesting new feature on Gmail. It scans the text in your mail to see if you had intended to attach anything to the email, and gives you a popup, if you inadvertently clicked on send without actually attaching the document. I have done this quite a few times and I know tens of mails that I have received without attachments and had to remind the sender to attach the file that they wished to send.
This surely is a life-saving or at least face-saving feature and only Google could really have come up with this idea.
However, I think this feature is a little new and probably not yet perfect. If you see the attached image, there is the text ‘find the attached’ in the mail, but there was no attachment. Hence the popup was thrown so that I could double check the contents of the mail and its enclosures.
The problem here was that the text it found was not in my mail, but in the body of the mail chain to which I was replying. Google with its advanced word and text pattern matching algorithms should be able fix this quite easily, provided they take the effort to listen to their users and find out about such problems. Surprisingly they don’t have any sort of complaints/feedback/bugzilla area on any of their sites/services. It is surprising companies don’t leverage the biggest tester base out there – its internet users.
No need to worry. Google is indexing the entire web. Their search engine will see this article (and any other webpages with the same content), auto-parse it and create support tickets automatically with the right Google team.