Idea #1: Attachment Reminders
You type up an email to send a file to a friend or coworker, and click send. Whoops, you forgot to attach the file. It's happened to everyone. Embarrassingly enough, I once did this three times in a row for the same file. Why is it so hard to remember? I'm not sure, but I suspect it has something to do with the foreign nature of attaching files in most email applications.
I've begun to rely on MarsEdit for updating this website, and one of the biggest reasons is a little feature that warns me before sending a post if I haven't filled one of the fields. (I can choose which fields are required for each weblog.)
This feature has got me thinking about email clients and how useful attachment reminders could be. As I see it, there are a few different ways to approach reminders:
Check the message for an attachment context. This could be difficult to implement. At its most basic, it would require a basic search of the email message for terms that might imply an attachment: attach (and all forms thereof), include, file, document, etc.
Always verify before sending. This would probably get annoying for most people.
Check only for certain recipients. Again, this would probably get annoying for some people, but if emails to certain individuals often or always include attachments, a reminder might be useful.
Is this too much to expect of software? Should software try to anticipate user error of this sort?
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This entry was posted on
Thursday, March 3, 2005 at 11:40 AM under the categories:
Ideas, Software.
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