Everyone has performed the classic maneuver of sending out an email with an attachment and forgetting to include the attachment. GMail has a new feature that can help keep you from doing this. Before every email is sent, they search the contents of the email to determine if your are referencing an attachment. If you are and there is no attachment they give you a warning before the email is actually sent. This is a pretty cool idea.

This feature is not turned on by default though. To turn it on go to GMail and click the Settings link in the upper right part of Gmail. Once you get to Settings, click on the Labs tab which is on the far right. Then scroll down to the section called Forgotten Attachment Detector. In this section click the radio button to Enable the feature then click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page.

Before emails are sent they will be scanned to see if it appears that there is a missing attachment. If so you'll get a warning. You can choose to still send the email or you can edit it further as needed.