The Kitchin Research Group

Does this comic (http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1817 ) apply to you? Do you miss the Gmail feature that will alert you that it seems like you mention an attachment but there isn't one attached before it lets you send it? Let's make Emacs help us here. We will scan our emails for the word "attach", and if we see it, scan the email for evidence of an attachment. Then create a hook function that will prompt us if it appears we mention an attachment, but don't have one.

An attachment looks like this in my messages:

<#part type="image/png" filename="~/Desktop/wordcloud.png" disposition=attachment>
<#/part>

So, probably finding "<#part" in the buffer means I probably have an attachment. We will use the message-send-hook to run this function. Here is the code. Some brief testing from me seems to work fine! It is pretty simple, but probably good enough to save me from sending messages with no attachment, and not too intrusive for when no attachment is actually needed, e.g. in replies. Let me know if you have ideas for improvements.

(defun email-says-attach-p ()
  "Return t if email suggests there could be an attachment."
  (save-excursion
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (re-search-forward "attach" nil t)))

(defun email-has-attachment-p ()
  "Return t if the currently open email has an attachment"
  (save-excursion
    (goto-char (point-min))
    (re-search-forward "<#part" nil t)))

(defun email-pre-send-check-attachment ()
  (when (and (email-says-attach-p)
             (not (email-has-attachment-p)))
    (unless
        (y-or-n-p "Your email suggests you need an attachment, but no attachment was found. Send anyway?")
      (error "It seems an attachment is needed, but none was found. Aborting send."))))

(add-hook 'message-send-hook 'email-pre-send-check-attachment)

Copyright (C) 2015 by John Kitchin. See the License for information about copying.

org-mode source

Org-mode version = 8.2.10