Testing GMail’s New Forgotten Attachment Detector

Amit Chowdhry | Tuesday September 16, 2008 | 2,605 views


Jon Kotker, an engineering intern and student at UC Berkeley wrote on the GMail Blog that there is now a new feature for the e-mail service called forgotten attachment detector.  This feature was added in the Google Labs and can be activated now.  What it does is that if you mention have attached a document, but actually forget to do so, GMail will send you an alert.

To set it up on your own GMail account, log in and then click on Labs.  Scroll to the bottom and you’ll see the Forgotten Attachment Detector created by Jonathan K. 

Click on the Enable button.  And then at the bottom, click on Save Changes.  After that you’re good to go.  I tested it a couple of times.  Here are the results:


Test 1: “Attach a document” - Failed
Screenshot:

This test didn’t notify me with any alerts after I entered the e-mail address and hit send

Test 2: “I have attached” - Passed
Screenshot:

Test 3: “Here is the attachment” - Failed

Screenshot:

Based on these three tests, what I found is that if you claimed you have attached something in the past tense, then you have a winner.  The other two were duds.  GMail team, if you read this, above are some suggestions.

Related Posts:



Categorized under

If you liked this post, subscribe to the Pulse 2.0 RSS feed.

Comments

  1. New Gmail tool keeps you from making a fool of yourself | Blogging
    September 16th, 2008 at 6:28 pm

    [...] this e-mail” or “included in this message” it won’t warn you. Amit over at Puse 2.0 also noticed that the system managed to flub “here is the attachment” and “Attach a [...]

  2. New Gmail tool keeps you from making a fool of yourself
    September 16th, 2008 at 10:40 pm

    [...] this e-mail” or “included in this message” it won’t warn you. Amit over at Puse 2.0 also noticed that the system managed to flub “here is the attachment” and “Attach a [...]

  3. New in Gmail: the end of ‘oops’ | csmonitor.com
    October 2nd, 2008 at 5:24 pm

    [...] up a reminder when a user hits send. The feature worked most of the time when I tested it out, but Amit at Pulse2.0 found flaws when he didn’t use “attached” in the body of the [...]

  4. Anonymous
    November 21st, 2008 at 8:42 pm

    thanks!

  5. ozlock
    December 27th, 2008 at 12:11 pm

    There is not “labs” tag on my gmail account. Where do you find labs? Seems to me that telling where labs is on the page would be a good idea. A find on the page returns no results.

  6. SBC
    January 20th, 2009 at 4:41 pm

    I created a video aobut how to use this lab on my blog. Check it out! http://googleappsfan.blogspot.com/2009/01/new-gmail-lab-forgotten-attachment.html

Leave a Comment

Copyright 2009 Pulse 2.0, LLC | About | Privacy Statement