Attachment Deficiency Disorder

Most people know A.D.D. as "attention deficit disorder" which plagues our additive and sugar addled teens and pre-teens leading to ad-breaks every three minutes lest we get bored, and no child left phoneless lest they forget who their friends are and presumably how to talk.

However to me A.D.D. actually stands for Attachment Deficiency Disorder which is the problem of sending an email mentioning attachments, but forgetting to attach them. Sometimes you realize right after hitting send, as I did just now and can take corrective action so you don't look quite a dumb. Other times it'll take a day or more for someone to get back to you before you realize. Then we have to suffer the excuses of clueless senders like "well your virus filter must have removed them", "they must be in your spam folder", or just plain denial followed by "I'll send them again for you..." Yeah right. I've even seen people take so much time blathering on with excuses or apologies that they send the email a second time without the attachment... The most heinous case would be the intentional "see my attached report on XYZ" sent minutes before you leave on vacation to the rain forest of Borneo with the report deliberately not attached. Maybe it is just my evil procrastinating mind that could think of such an example, but I'm sure it happens...

Granted it is an easy mistake - I probably do it about one quarter of the time when I send emails with attachments, and I always try to be careful and do attachments first... But sometimes I just suffer from that other A.D.D. and get too engrossed in writing the email to remember the attachments.

My personal belief is there will be a lot of fans for the first email client to add a feature to check for the "attachment", "attached photos", "attached invoice" etc. in the email and warn you if you don't attach one (before sending of course). It really can't be that hard can it?