Knowledge base
Drafts
Autosaved three seconds after you stop typing, and reopened from the Drafts folder with the recipients, the subject, the body and the From address intact. The attachments stay behind.
Details
- The timer restarts on every keystroke, so the write lands three seconds after the last one. A save that fails says nothing. The wait doubles each time, to a ceiling of a minute, and you are told once, after three failures in a row.
- A recipient, a subject or a line of body: any one of the three starts saving, and a composer you have not touched writes nothing. Each save overwrites the same draft rather than leaving a row per keystroke behind.
- Attachments are the gap. A draft keeps their names, types and sizes and not their bytes, because rewriting every file to storage every three seconds while somebody is mid-sentence is not worth what it costs, so a draft you reopen comes back without the files, and they have to be attached again.
- A reopened draft keeps the From address it was saved with, as long as this workspace can still send as it; otherwise the composer falls back to the address this workspace last sent from. Sending from the Drafts folder removes the saved copy, so nothing is listed in Drafts and Sent at once.
- A reply or a forward you leave without sending is kept as a draft too. Open the reply on that message again, in the browser or on the phone, and it carries on where you stopped. Cancel in the browser, or Discard draft on the phone, throws it away.
Google Workspace
Fastmail