How Attachment Reminders work inside Gmail?

Gmail has a built-in feature that reminds you of adding file attachments before the email is sent to the recipient. Gmail scans the text of your email and shows an alert if it thinks you intended to include a file attachment in the message but forgot to do so.

gmail-attachment.gif

If you haven’t seen this earlier, compose a new email in Gmail, add “I’ve attached the file” in the body and hit send. Gmail will pop-up a warning saying - “it seems like you forgot to attach the file.”

How does the forgotten attachment detector work inside Gmail? I was looking at the source code of Gmail.com using Chrome Dev Tools and found an interesting snippet that bares it all.

gmail-source-code.png

When you hit the send button, Gmail scans the text of your outgoing message and looks for the following word combinations using regex.

|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

If a match is found, a warning is shown so you’ll never forget to include that important attachment again.

Microsoft Outlook too includes an attachment detector feature and, unlike Gmail, it also provides you an option to define custom keywords that should trigger the missing attachment alert.

Also see: Download Gmail Attachments to Google Drive

Amit Agarwal

Amit Agarwal

Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion

Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.

Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory

0

Awards & Titles

Digital Inspiration has won several awards since it's launch in 2004.

Google Developer Expert

Google Developer Expert

Google awarded us the Google Developer Expert award recogizing our work in Google Workspace.

ProductHunt Golden Kitty

ProductHunt Golden Kitty

Our Gmail tool won the Lifehack of the Year award at ProductHunt Golden Kitty Awards in 2017.

Microsoft MVP Alumni

Microsoft MVP Alumni

Microsoft awarded us the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) title for 5 years in a row.

Google Cloud Champion

Google Cloud Champion

Google awarded us the Champion Innovator title recognizing our technical skill and expertise.

Email Newsletter

Sign up for our email newsletter to stay up to date.

We will never send any spam emails. Promise.