If you use Google Mail you may have noticed the Forgotten Attachment Detector on the long list of Lab extras. This feature looks for a keyword like “attached” in your email and then double checks to make sure you have actually remembered to attach something. However, I can show you how to do the same thing in Thunderbird and in t-bird it works even better.

Step 1. Grab the Check and Send add-on from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2281.

Step 2. After you have installed it and restarted, go to Tools >> Add-ons >> Check and Send and click Preferences.

Step 3. Click on the second tab labeled “Attachments”. The wording on the add-on is a little strange so don’t bother to follow the logic. Just keep going…

Step 4. Select the first checkbox and make sure the drop-down says “appear”.

Step 5. Now type in the word or words you want it to test for that would mean there should be an attachment. If you want it to test against different words, separate them with a pipe ” | “.

Step 6. Leave the rest as it is and click “ok”.

This works so much better than Gmail’s feature because a) it actually works and b) you can select the words you really use in an email to tell someone there is an attachment.

Give it a try and let me know if you can improve on this.