Discarded Gmail Drafts
December 5, 2007 12:47 am Believe It Or NotI can’t believe it! I just lost *months* of valuable notes I’ve been saving in a draft in my Gmail inbox. O_o
I accidentally hit the discard button, and my draft was gone. I was thrilled to see that there was a yellow bar to “undo” the discard.
My draft was back, but to the biggest disappointment of my life only its title was back, the body of the actual valuable draft was gone. I got an empty draft back. A bloody empty draft that sat there, symbolizing Google, and looking at me maliciously. I felt like breaking my desktop to pieces. I felt like banging my head on the wall. Gosh, I felt like suing them!
I desperately made a quick research hoping for a some feature I don’t know about that will help me recover my notes, but all I found was complaints from other people who had the same problem as mine.
I headed straight on to Gmail’s help page to submit a feature request. Well, yeah, you guessed it, Google is getting a not-so-nice message from across the ocean today. And at the end of the form, they ask for your country. Does it really matter? I just want my draft back, gee!
How complicated it is to move discarded *drafts* to the trash folder like deleted messages are? It’s *Google*. How complicated is that for them? Why not have that implemented at the very first place before anyone asking for it? It just exactly makes sense, the opposite is complete nonsense.
I used to trust Google and Gmail, in a way. I don’t anymore. Like they care!
An ex-loyal Gmail user — going to bed with a heavy heart.
The Curse of Technology » Lalla Mira’s Multilingual Blog :
Date: December 30, 2007 @ 1:09 pm
[...] my eyes. I saw all my data fade away in the unknown space. I saw me as broken as when I lost my precious Gmail draft, only 36 hundred times worse. Oh wait, I backed everything up just recently. Yay! I took the [...]
Area SEO :
Date: February 26, 2008 @ 1:18 pm
ABSOLUTELLY the worst thing that i have seen… i was writing like a 20 page proposal… and poof… it went to nothing next time i looked at it… somehow is autosaved a blank copy… put the damn drafts in trash god damnit google.
Lalla Mira :
Date: February 26, 2008 @ 1:28 pm
@AS: I so do know how you feel. :(
Good luck with re-writing everything from scratch.
When similar problems happen to me with Word, I fortunately have a good memory to practically write everything I lost easily and quite quickly. But that draft I lost was more like a long cumulation of practical information, that I couldn’t remember.
Micky Leas :
Date: April 10, 2008 @ 7:00 am
I have just went through the same thing.
I am so upset, it had taken me two hours to type the (Extremely long) letter. I move my mouse and accidentally click “Discard”! I’m on a laptop here so, clicking unwanted things isn’t that uncommon, however…This was really important. I sympathize with you completely.
Lalla Mira :
Date: April 10, 2008 @ 11:24 am
Isn’t that awful Micky! That happened to me too with a long angry email, but the good news is that having written the email relieved me to the extent that I didn’t feel the need to re-write it like I first did anymore. And I surprisingly found myself writing a forgiveness email instead. :D True story!
I wish you a lot of patience to re-write everything from scratch again! :-/
amr :
Date: April 30, 2008 @ 1:45 pm
the same killing scenario happened with me right now, when I mistakenly hit discard, I got scared forgetting the undo feature and too quickly closed the tab hoping to prevent the discard request from being sent, but alas, I wasn’t that fast and more than 1 year of cumulative notes have gone away!
what irritates me more when I searched about the issue is that this complaint is sent to Google since 2005 without any response
there is no way to use an IMAP client along with Gmail to prevent such disasters!
Lalla Mira :
Date: May 1, 2008 @ 11:51 am
Amr, would it make you feel better if I tell you that the undo feature does only return the message’s title, with no content in it at all?
It’s true! It’s an even worse nightmare to have that glimpse of hope in a fraction of a second. Better be disappointed once for all.
I sympathize with you!
amr :
Date: May 2, 2008 @ 3:14 pm
Unfortunately I had this glimpse of hope because it worked for me once before when I could restore an unimportant draft message!
It is really the curse of technology, as before it I could preserve lots of paper notes for more than 12 years till now !
Lalla Mira :
Date: May 5, 2008 @ 11:27 am
The undo feature works only for deleted messages for me, never drafts.
Could you manage to get the information you lost?
amr :
Date: May 7, 2008 @ 11:40 am
No! Even the trick of switching Gmail interface to old version didn’t work as suggested in the Gmail Help group.
Thanks God that I didn’t encounter the worst and more tragic scenario of losing all drafts at once like this guy:
http://groups.google.ca/group/Gmail-Help-Reading-Messages-en/browse_thread/thread/dc513f90f34c128d/268e47e89b939658?lnk=gst&q=discarded+draft#268e47e89b939658