I often start a email or message board post and change my mind. It’s not worth saying. Or better left unsaid. Close the compose window or just close the tab. On the SDMB I click on the Main menu folder.
Except Gmail and Hotmail has a useless and very irritating Drafts folder. Sitting there mocking me with unsent messages from days and months gone past.
Every now and then I empty the Drafts folder. What a stupid and unwanted feature. imho
Who the hell needs to save a 6 line email? Am I going to die if it gets lost and I have to <gasp> retype it? I’m even quite capable of retyping a 20 line message. Its not a big honking deal.
Until your cat destroys you email and you want it back. But for any text, including SDMB posts, I use the Lazarus plugin to back up what I type.
Drafts folder is supremely useful. I save all kinds of notes there, intentionally. It beats the old “send an email to myself, then delete and replace if I add anything” schtick.
It seems it gives you a common annoyance to save you from a rare disaster. Maybe that’s not worth it for you. I do wish that it wouldn’t save a blank email, or one that just contains my signature.
I like the way Gmail keeps me from messing up because I mess up with disturbing regularity.
I liked the old format a lot better also.
I really should type all emails & message board posts in notebook or some place that is a lot harder to accidentally erase than on the reply window.
In Thunderbird, if you close the Compose window on a message without ever explicitly saving it to Drafts, you’ll get a prompt asking if you want to save the message or discard it. If you say to discard it, and Thunderbird had previously auto-saved it into Drafts for you, then it’ll delete the copy from Drafts too. This works very well.
I need to look into Thunderbird. That sounds like a more sensible approach.
Ideally there should be a set up option for saving to drafts. I’d suggest a word count. If the message is over xxx words save in drafts. I’d set mine around 75 words. I don’t mind retyping anything less. Losing a message is pretty rare anyway.
Not Gmail/Yahoo, but autosave in Outlook has saved me a lot of hassle quite a few times.
Power outages, unexpected system or application crashes, “helpful family members” closing emails, etc… are all things that have happened to me that I used a ‘draft’ message to retrieve. Some of my emails are rather lengthy, and I would have just abandoned the effort in some cases rather than trying to recreate the message.
When you close an email, does it not give you an option to save/abandon? Outlook certainly does, when closed manually.
I use the drafts feature in Gmail a lot. Usually if I have something important, but want to look at it later, but also if I get interrupted or close a window by accident or something.
I very much like the autosave drafts feature.
Thunderbird is good for you. I have a Yahoo e-mail address because I’ve had it since 2001 and I ain’t giving up now, but Yahoo’s web interface is unbearably useless. I avoid the lunacy that was clearly thrown together by lobotomized apes and use Thunderbird. I almost forget how badly Yahoo sucks because I never have to deal with their horse shit.