Testing Gmail’s New Forgotten Attachment Detector

By Amit Chowdhry ● Sep 16, 2008

Jon Kotker, an engineering intern and student at UC Berkeley, wrote on the Gmail Blog that there is a new feature for the e-mail service called forgotten attachment detector.

This feature is available through the Google Labs and can be activated now.  What it does is that if you mention an attachment in an email, but actually forget to add it 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: “I have attached” – Passed
Test 2: “Here is the attachment” – Failed

Based on these tests, what I found is that if you claimed you have attached something in the past tense, then you have a winner.