Attaching the attachments

Do you ever do this? You write a long email to someone explaining something and then say that you are going to attach something and totally forget to do it? Yep, me all the time. I'm sure I have hundreds of emails that say "oops" in the title.

Today I was emailing someone via Gmail and said I'm attaching a spreadsheet to show you my figures and clicked on send, and instead of me just sending it and getting a message from someone later saying "Where was the attachment?" instead, I got a message saying "your message mentioned that you were sending an attachment, but you haven't, do you still want to send the message?" I was amazed!

I didn't know whether to be thrilled that things are so smart that they are reminding me of things I should do, or that they have put phrases into their coding to search for things that you may write in your emails. I know when I use Gmail that the sponsored ads at the right of the mail always sort of correspond to the subject (sometimes with hilarious result) but I didn't really think about how much they are reading. What they say is true, nothing on the internet is truly private, so we need to always keep that in mind.

Good thing my email wasn't something more sinister, the message may have said "we think you are a lunatic, we are calling the police now, are you sure you want to send that message?"