AttachCheck

I received an email last week with the subject, "woops…attached this time," and decided that enough was enough. How many times I have read (or written) emails referencing the file "attached below" that is nowhere to be found.

I’ve heard people joke about creating a program that would remind people to actually attach their attachments but Googling only came up with two Outlook specific scripts. So I wrote one myself.

The only tough problems are interface issues. Since I send through Mutt, I figured the best, least invasive, and least MUA-specific way to set it up was a MTA wrapper that could fail and spit out warnings on STDERR (which Mutt and most MUAs will then show you) when the program expects attachments but find them missing.

The user then needs the ability to either confirm that they really want to send the message sans attachment or they need to go add their forgotten file. The former example is the tricky one from an interface perpsective. Since you can’t depend on being able to ask "Y/N", the program currently looks either for an added header or a CONFIRM command in the subject that it will then strip out before actually sending. This should make it work with just about anything that sends mail using /usr/sbin/sendmail.

At the moment, the program is smart enough to ignore attached PGP signatures but not smart enough to understand any languages other than English (and a super limited vocabulary at that). Patches and suggestions are welcome.

You can grab the script and the necessary Mutt configuration to make it painless at this little web page I put up for it here:

http://mako.cc/projects/attachcheck/

4 Replies to “AttachCheck”

  1. Great! I also linked to two other implementations. I’m not claiming this is a new idea or that I have the first implementation. I realize it is now.

    I did this so I could have a MUA-agnostic way of doing this that I could use in Mutt and and listed it here so that others might use it as well. :)

  2. Thank you! I’ve wanted a mutt-usable-implementation ever since I discovered kmail did it. I’ve looked at trying to leverage the spell-checking hooks but never figured it out. This looks great!

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