Missing email attachments are a pain for both the sender and the recipient of messages, and at the same time an all-too-often occurrence. However, there are ways to prevent the task of adding an attachment from slipping the mind of the users. The Forgotten Attachment Detector (FAD) is a tool designed for just such a purpose. An enhancement for Office 2007 Outlook, FAD is capable of identifying emails with missing attachments and warning the user to correct the issue. FAD was released under the Office Labs umbrella as an add-in for Outlook 2007.

“Like similar projects, FAD uses the presence of certain keywords such as “have attached” and “find attached” to determine if a mail is likely to include an attachment. To improve its accuracy FAD also uses a set of secondary keyword pairs. These are words that have a lower likelihood of indicating a mail is likely to include an attachment except when they appear together. For example: Finding just the word “attached” in a mail isn’t a reliable indicator that a mail is likely to include an attachment,” revealed Microsoft's Bhavesh Chauhan, the creator of FAD.

FAD scans the text of a message in order to determine whether the email indicates that an attachment should be present. The add-in is set up by default with a set of parameters that permit it to correctly identify user intent of adding an attachment from simple uses of the “attach” term. Of course, at the same time, FAD provides users with the option to fine tune the add-in. “The current version allows you to customize which keywords FAD uses for detection. To customize the keywords click the “FAD” button on the main Outlook toolbar. The dialog that opens allows you to add, edit, or delete the keywords which will trigger a notification from FAD,” Chauhan added.

Forgotten Attachment Detector is available for download here.