So I use Gmail as my primary email, I have Yahoo & Hotmail accounts too, but mostly use those as spam catchers. In theory I have an email through my ISP, but I’ve never used it. Yesterday, on Gmail, I was sending out an email, and forgot to attach the file I was sending along, but in the email I wrote the phrase “I have attached…”. So I hit send, and instead of the email getting sent I get a popup asking me if I meant to attach a file cause I put the phrase “I have attached…” in my email, and do I want to continue to send or cancel send and attach file?
So of course I hit cancel and go back and attach the file. And I’m glad that it did get caught cause this particular email was kinda important but under the circumstances I’d have never noticed (and the receiver would likely never have told me) that I’d neglected to attach the file, and that would have been a bad thing.
But really? When did the system start reading my email well enough to know that I meant to attach a file and stop me when I didn’t? I’m not sure I like that…..
Nothing to see here move along. SkyNet is just looking out for you, the consumer.
It's probably just something the programmer threw in there as a lark. But yeah, the fact that they're looking for patterns in our email is a little troubling.
Having done some programming myself, I have to agree that its exactly the sorta thing that someone woulda tossed in for the fun of it. I think its that I just find it disturbing that they CAN, though that really shouldn't have been a surprise either.
The forgotten attachment detector was a very cool Gmail Lab feature that got rolled into regular Gmail back in 2010. http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/gmail-labs-graduation-and-retirement.html
From the POV of the occasionally forgetfull emailer I agree its cool.
From the POV of the occasionally paranoid person that I am I find it disturbing because I have enough programming background to understand how easy it would be to take that concept and twist it.