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Fastmail reminded me when I forgot an attachment

37 points by prirun ↗ HN
I'm switching to Fastmail, and today when I tried to send an email, I got a popup window saying "It looks like you might have forgotten to include the attachment, because you wrote 'Attached is' but there is no attachment". And it was right!

Wow, what a great feature! I can't even say how many times I have forgotten attachments and had to send a follow-up email.

34 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 81.6 ms ] thread
delgaudm
Cool. Right? Gmail and Zoho mail do this too. Not sure about others.
codegeek
Gmail web app has it for a while :)
geocrasher
Really? I looked, and mine does not, and I don't see where to enable it. I believe you of course, I just can't replicate.

Edit: Fixed. Toggled experimental features on, then off again, and it now works. ¯\(º_o)/¯

jason2323
Its awesome to see folks get excited about simple features!
slowmovintarget
It's funny how that works. Before there was The Web, I was porting a POS system to Windows 95 from Windows 3.11. This was a big deal, going from 16 to 32 bits!

OK, not really a gigantic deal. More addressable memory was great. But there was a monkey wrench that we didn't catch until the evening we were to ship the new version (as in put it on an installers hard drive for installing on site). The POS software had to run a receipt printer, send text to a tower display, and pop a cash drawer for change. Each of these used to work by sending interrupts directly to the ports.

Interrupt... Ka-ching, cash drawer popped.

Interrupt + ASCII... {flash} and total displayed on LED

Interrupt + ASCII... receipt prints out

I dug through Win32 manuals to figure out the new system-wrapped way to do this. Win32 wrapped the port interrupts in an API, no more direct sends to the ports without a handshake to the OS. But I figured out the drawer and tower... no problems.

But receipt printing!

Interrupt + line of text + line feed... new line, text, new line, new line

What?!? Windows was opening the port, causing a line feed, sending the text with my line feed, then sending another line feed and closing the port. A fifteen item receipt that once took three inches of receipt paper, now took two feet. It was 6pm the night before install...

I wrestled with it into the wee hours, and managed to get Windows to leave the in between alone so that receipts printed properly. Except for the first time. The first time the software printed during an executable session, you got the clown-receipt. It was 2am... I couldn't figure out how to fix this last item.

So I coded in a welcome message. When the user logged in to the POS system for the first time, it would print out "Good morning {user}" or "Good afternoon {user}." This buried the problem of the extra lines, hiding it behind this small bit of odd behavior. All the rest of the receipts for the session would print properly.

It was 3am... I'm shipping it. Sent... Delivered.

Customers remarked "heh... that's new."

A few months went by and I finally got around to fixing that bug. So I removed that little greeting work-around. The complaints were immediate, consistent, and pronounced. "Why doesn't it say 'good morning' to me any more? I liked that! Put that back."

My boss got a good laugh at that. We put the feature back in with a setting, on by default.

Users can be delighted by small touches.

brnt
Thunderbird also has for years. Come to think of it, which clients don't?
randomhodler84
It’s literally been a thing for decades. Eudora had this feature in the 90s. I’d be suspect of any mail client that doesn’t.
geocrasher
Gmail. Gmail doesn't have it. And as somebody who used Thunderbird since the early 00's, it was a disappointment when I moved to using gmail.com instead of IMAP/Tbird. But, the move solved other problems for me, so ¯\(º_o)/¯

Still wish Gmail had it, though.

EDIT: See below. It was an issue unique to my account

MattJ100
Actually it does have this feature, and has done for many years. Many clients have it now, but Gmail was where I first encountered it. I don't know if it was the pioneer.

Here's a blog post by someone digging into how it works: https://www.labnol.org/internet/gmail-attachment-reminder/31...

geocrasher
Indeed I've seen other comments in this thread that indicate the same. I tested sending an email with the word "attachment" in it, with no attachment, and Gmail didn't have any problem sending it.

I tested it with my work email on Google Workspace, and it showed the popup. It must be a setting.

Weird.

EDIT: After toggling experimental features on, then off again, it now works. ¯\(º_o)/¯

brnt
> After toggling experimental features on, then off again, it now works.

Still the most sure-fire way of fixing anything computerized.

pfranz
I'm pretty sure Gmail is where I first noticed this years and years ago. I've been with Fastmail for the past many years, but remember the dialog from Gmail. Maybe it was an experiment you had to enable and are opted out of?

A quick search says that automatic footers (company logos) can be interpreted as attachments...meaning you won't see the warning. Could that be your issue?

https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-get-a-forgotten-attachment-r...

unnah
Out of interest, I had a look at the relevant Thunderbird source: https://searchfox.org/comm-central/source/mail/components/co...

The code simply checks the subject and body text, excluding the signature and any quoted text, for keywords defined in the configuration item mail.compose.attachment_reminder_keywords. The default keywords are: ".doc,.pdf,.xls,.ppt,.rtf,.pps,attachment,attach,attached,attaching,enclosed,CV,cover letter"

This little feature must have made lots of users happy one time or another...

emptysea
Interesting! I'm also surprised thunderbird's written in JS and not C++.
jacob019
Fastmail is fantastic, so glad to be off gmail. I've been enjoying the masked email feature. There really isn't much competition in this space, fastmail get's it right: clean, simple, fast. I wish I could self host something comparable, but open source webmail doesn't come close, especially for search.
theandrewbailey
When I signed up for Fastmail, I decided to use my own domain. Having a wildcard inbox is awesome. For any random account, I make up an email address on the spot.
jacob019
I do that too, but the masked emails are more disposable.
mcint
The CEO, Bron Gondwana, is a core contributor to Cyrus IMAP, and is working to standardize JMAP (jmap.io) for broader use, through IETF, as well.

I pay for fastmail, but saying this all again makes me want to sponsor this guy too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=brongondwana

chanandler_bong
Surprised nobody is commenting about the fact that [service] is effectively reading your email and parsing it for keywords. What else are they parsing for?
mwint
Probably implemented in client side JS, which somehow makes this far less creepy to me.
rbinv
It's probably checked on the client.
tirpen
The next thing you know they will be looking at the CC and REPLY-TO headers! When will it stop?!

Irony aside, I don't think this is any worse than for instance a text editor detecting programming languages by, yes, parsing the content in order to provide a useful function to the user.

Saris
The service also has to read your email to send/receive, and needs to parse the to: field at least to figure out where to send to.

If you're worried about that I don't email is a good choice for you.

miki123211
Thunderbird does this too.

It's especially ironic when you're telling somebody that they forgot the attachment, and Thunderbird detects the word "attachment" in your email and pops up that warning.

nzach
Yesterday I was trying to setup a webdav client and in the process tried to use my master password. Strangely the connection was refused and it left me slightly confused about how to properly configure it.

Shortly I received an email saying something along the lines: "We blocked a login attempt via webdav using your master password. If you want to use this feature this is how you do it properly."

I couldn't be a happier customer.

ss108
Gmail, ProtonMail, and Outlook all do this.
temp_praneshp
Fastmail is great, but this is not a reason. Gmail had this >10 years ago, and Thunderbird too.
prirun
OP here. I've been on Gmail for around 13 years and it has never reminded me of this.

So I just now ran a test, sent a mail that said "attached is a copy of your letter.", and Gmail sent it without comment.

But, when I enable the Javascript/Standard interface, it did remind me. I use the "Basic HTML" interface and never switched to the JS/Standard interface so I never saw the reminder. I tried the Standard interface recently and really don't care for it much, though I concede it has more features, like being able to select all messages in a mailbox. I had to use that to get all my Inbox mail moved the the Archive folder on Gmail when I migrated to Fastmail.

bravenous
Implies they scan your email. Creepy. So no difference if it is FastMail, Gmail, Proton. Irony is they all pitch privacy, except from themselves.
diroussel
How can you be surprised that a web email front end is able to do .indexOf() on your text?

It’s not creepy, it’s user friendly.

slenk
Gmail has had this for quite a while...