Outlook Attachment Reminder 0.9.8.2 is a nifty utility that avoids the common problem of sending an email with an attachment – but forgetting to attach the file! I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve referred to an attachment that was never attached. And it’s the ‘referring to’ of an attachment that make the Outlook 2010 Attachment Reminder work.

The utility was created by CodePlex’s Gourav Das and it searches through the body of the email you’ve just written, looking for words like “attachment” and “attached”. If such words are found, it then checks to see whether you have indeed attached a file. If you haven’t, it then prompts you with a simple message box. The facility to update the list of “alert words” gives the Outlook 2010 Attachment Reminder a great deal of flexibility. For example, if you find that you often refer to attachments as “files”, you can add the words “file” and “files” to the list of alert words and the utility will check for those too.

For the techies out there, the add-in was developed in VS 2008 (C# and requires .NET 3.5), using the VSTO. At the time of writing, release 0.9.8.2 is the current one.

The Attachment Reminder In Outlook 2010

The good news is that although the Outlook attachment reminder was originally developed for use in Office 2007, it works with Outlook 2010 too. At least it’s compatibility with the Office 2010 Technical Preview, suggests that it will work with Outlook 2010 when it ships. The author of the software admits that the attachment reminder menu is not easily accessible at the moment, but he is working on that as we speak.

You can download the Outlook 2010 Attachment Reminder here.

Also available is the Forgotten Attachment Detector from Office Labs, which works on the same principle of searching for a list of words that suggest an attachment shoule be present.

Tags | add in, outlook 2010