It seems that recently I’ve been sending quite a few emails that require me to attach things to them. I’ve always had a bit of a problem, which from my experience of receiving emails also seems to be quite common, of writing the email first and then forgetting to add the attachment.

This usually results in me (just seconds after sending the email) having to write a short follow-up email saying how I’d forgot to attach them and ensure with the attachments included (as it’s really bad when you forget the attachments on this second email).

I remembered seeing that Gmail labs have added a forgotten attachment feature recently, so I did a quick search to find a plugin for Thunderbird that allows me to do the same (as I use Gmail over IMAP most of the time).

The plugin I found is called Check and Send which allows you to check quite a few things (or prompt you to manually double check every email before you really send it - which I disabled straight away) but most importantly it has the following check:

whether the words you pre-defined exist in the message and the message does not have any attachments

Bingo, that’ll do nicely. Now whenever I write ‘attached’ or ‘attachment’ it will let me know if the email doesn’t have any attachment. It even ignores any quoted text.