Version: (using KDE KDE 3.1.3) Installed from: SuSE RPMs I bet this has already happened to virtually everybody, sending a mail that should have some file attached, while actually forgetting to attach it. Therefore I think it would be good if KMail could warn if the body of the outgoing mail contained words 'attachment' or 'attached' (preferably both i18n()-ed and untranslated), but the mail had no attachment.
I guess the list of keywords has to be configurable. I would at least also need "patch".
Well, now I'll post the patch to the Kmail mailing list - try it and send comments.
Subject: Re: Warn when mail contains word 'attachment' yet =?iso-8859-1?q?the=09outgoing_mail_has_no?= attachment Alexey's patch has been applied. So this new feature will be available in KDE 3.2.
Thanks for implementing this feature, but I think it'd need a small tweak. I just finished writing a very long mail, at the beginning of which I wrote 'see attached test app' but while writing the mail I forgot about it. KMail correctly warned me, but my first reaction was "Huh? What the hell? Is KMail broken?" and only after reading a good part of the mail again I found the place and realized I really intended to add an attachment. I think it'd help if the warning dialog also included a small part of the mail where a matching word was found (e.g. for my mail it'd also say "...is in the attached test app. Simulate..."). I think it'd also save people from some unjustified KMail cursing ;).
I can only speak for myself but I think this is nonsense. If the user doesn't know anymore why he wanted to add an attachment he should think about it again. And how do you know much text should be displayed in the "reminder"? The sentence? This would end up in a message box that doesn't even fit to your screen. The last X words? How many? How do you know that the part is meaningful?
My suggestion would be to put a "don't display this again" check box on the dialog and a place in settings to turn the feature back on if wanted. This IMHO should be a standard for any kind of dialog such as these, not just for kmail but all of KDE. I can see the benefit of these for new users but sometimes they annoy more than help.
On Friday 20 February 2004 14:19, Eugene Nine wrote: > My suggestion would be to put a "don't display this again" check > box on the dialog and a place in settings to turn the feature back on if You already can switch it on and off in the settings. > wanted. This IMHO should be a standard for any kind of dialog such as > these, not just for kmail but all of KDE. I can see the benefit of these > for new users but sometimes they annoy more than help. Do you want to tell that we need some kind of artifical intelligence to find out the cases when the user would like to use this feature and when not? Come on, if a user can't decide what he wants, then the programmer can hardly help him.
>You already can switch it on and off in the settings. My bad, didn't see it when I looked. It should be really easy to add the check to the dialog then since the setting is already stored. >Do you want to tell that we need some kind of artifical intelligence to find out the cases when the user would like to use this feature and when not? Come on, if a user can't decide what he wants, then the programmer can hardly help him. No, my suggestion is to have all the helpful features on by default with a "don't remind me again" on all of them so the user can decide each time they are presented with a new one weather they want to turn it off or not. Somewhere during an install I was asked if I were a new user or advanced user or somewhere in between, don't remember if that was KDE or distro specific though. A lot of the dialog settings could be specified at that point, i.e. turn them off if the user chooses advanced.
> If the user doesn't know anymore why he wanted to add an attachment he should think about it again. Sure. But knowing about which part of the long mail to think again would help. What if I used one of the triggering words with a different meaning? I'd have to read carefully the whole mail to find it. > And how do you know much text should be displayed in the "reminder"? The sentence? This would end up in a message box that doesn't even fit to your screen. The last X words? How many? How do you know that the part is meaningful? I said nothing about being meaningful. Simply getting including few words to the left and few words to the right would do, just to quickly remind in which part of the mail it is. That's why even the included example has the sentences cut at 3 words to the left and right.
On Freitag, 20. Februar 2004 15:31, Lubos Lunak wrote: > > If the user doesn't know anymore why he wanted to add an attachment he > > should think about it again. > > Sure. But knowing about which part of the long mail to think again would > help. What if I used one of the triggering words with a different > meaning? I'd have to read carefully the whole mail to find it. Perhaps it would help to show the matched words. So the user could do a Ctrl-F to search the word. Highlighting would be the optimum, but it's much harder to implement I guess.
I hope by "show" you mean scrolling to that text, not quoting. However Composer is able to use colors in the text, so why not highlight it, or simply apply new style "highlight". That way vision impaired people could adjust it more comfortably.
Found the feature in current kmails configuration dialog. You can configure the words that should be scanned for.