Rarely do features surprise me these days. I’ve seen every iteration of create, read, update, destroy you could think of in dozens of technologies of varying complexities and interoperability. Sometimes you have to wait for things, sometimes you need to display a lot of information.

Because of this, I think it’s worthy to whip out a small post congratulating and celebrating the little things that keep our lives in order. This feature is as dumb as can be: When you type certain phrases that imply an attachment should be present, Gmail warns you if there’s no attachment before sending.

Turns out Outlook has the same feature, and you can customize the triggers. For Gmail, this writer dug up the keyword list:

see attached|see attachment|see included|is attached|attached is|are attached|attached are|attached to this email|attached to this message|I’m attaching|I am attaching|I’ve attached|I have attached|I attach|I attached|find attached|find the attached|find included|find the included|attached file|see the attached|see attachments|attached files|see the attachment

They identified a problem I’m sure no one writes in to complain about. It’s a mistake we’ve all made, and I know I personally just chalk it up to forgetfulness and send a quick follow-up email with the attachment. This little feature (amongst others) gives me a second chance at catching a dumb mistake and correcting it.

To tease a larger rant, this is also the Google I miss. When internal teams could experiment and give consumers features like these (and keep them around) instead of furthering the ecosystem.

Thanks, attachment reminders!