Hello!

I’m Bhavesh Chauhan and hopefully you’ve already downloaded my Forgotten Attachment Detector (FAD) add-in for Outlook. FAD is a little add-in that checks your email before you send it to see if you’ve forgotten to “attach an attachment”. It uses a small set of customizable keywords to do its detection. If it detects that you may have forgotten to “attach an attachment” it pops up a dialog that lets you fix your mistake before the mail goes out. My goal with FAD is for you to have one less thing to worry about. If you haven't already tried it, you can learn more and download FAD from the Project Page. Here’s my story with FAD:

I started with Microsoft in July, 2007 after graduating from Sardar Patel College of Engineering. I joined Microsoft’s IT team in Hyderabad, India, as a Test Engineer. I was in the role for about a year and a half and have now switched over to a development role.

In my free time I love watching movies, watching and playing cricket, and coding. One evening last September I decided I wanted to try out Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO). The month before I had received several emails missing their attachments, so I decided to create a VSTO add-in that would help people avoid making this mistake. A few weeks later I released the very first version FAD on Toolbox, our internal Microsoft tools sharing site. FAD started getting downloads and suggestions came in from people who liked it. I was glad I’d created something useful so I decided to put more time into it improving it.

Like other Forgotten Attachment Detectors on the web, when you send an email FAD checks it for keywords that indicate you’ve forgotten to attach an attachment. If it detects this, it notifies you and gives you a chance to correct any mistakes.

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. You might just be taking about your “attached garage” (it’s unlikely your actually going to be trying to attach a garage to an email now isn’t it?) However, if the word “attached” appears in the same sentence as say the word “file” (as in “I’ve attached the related file”) then we think there is a pretty good likelihood that the mail should include an attachment.

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.

I’m excited it’s now available to everyone who uses Outlook. Hope you’ll share your feedback here.