Placeholder attachment trick
Eudora Tip #171/19-Mar-2003

After I do work with my clients I email them an invoice or a receipt. My accounts package creates the relevant document and then I need to attach it to an email and send it away.

To make life easier for myself I created a standard email for the invoice and another for the receipt, using Eudora’s Stationery feature [Eudora Tip #48/24-Aug-2000].

Now, the biggest problem with this is that sometimes I fill in the details in the stationery message – name, invoice number etc, and then forget to attach the invoice.

This tends to make me look a bit silly, and I don’t like that.

So here’s what I did: I added a dummy attachment to the message at the time I created the stationery file and then deleted that attachment.

For one thing the broken attachment icon helps remind me to actually attach the invoice. When I attach the real invoice I delete the broken icon for the dummy (just select it and press Delete).

For another, if I try to send the message with that broken attachment – because I haven’t replaced it with the real thing – Eudora warns me that there was an error – the document was not found. The message doesn’t actually go. That alerts me to the problem and I can fix it before embarrassing myself.