I Forgot My Attachment!

Written by David Charney
Posted: April 13, 2008 (1 year, 11 months ago) | 3 comments

Could I please get a show of hands - who has ever sent an email and forgot to attach the coveted file that was the overall point of the email itself? Both of my hands are up. How am I typing with both hands up? Wild.

Anyway, as a business owner and developer, I know that looking competent to a prospect or client is very important and while forgetting to attach their proposal, a wireframe, a deliverable, or a picture of the cutest dog that you found on digg or reddit may seem like a small thing, it could put a little doubt in your abilities. So I have a suggestion. I tend to use Thunderbird and Google Mail so I am going to direct this idea towards those great developers of these apps because if Yahoo Mail or someone else does this it (selfishly) doesn’t do much for me. Your applications seem to do a million things when I hit that send button. They check to see if I have a subject written, they check my spelling, they in some cases check my type of attachment and then say Whoa! You can’t send an exe through our system fool!

I would like to see one more check when my email gets sent. I want you to look for the words “attached” and “attachment” (and whatever other brilliant words that do the job) and if the word be there and there be no attachment, pop-up one of those hilarious reminders that says “We noticed you used the words attachment but do not have any files attached. Would you like to attach a file?” Options: Hell yes. Hell no.

And of course, throw a check box in the setup so it can be an option. I would hate to piss off some guy named Wally Attachmenthousen. And thus concludes my user experience based rant of the day. You guys rock. Thanks for listening.