Solved Thunderbird v115 is retaining Draft emails after they are sent.

As the title says. Is anyone else seeing this behaviour?

It is random and doesn't happen with every email.

I suspect it is a bug that will get sorted and it is not a big deal to delete these draft emails. Just annoying.

wiganken said:

As the title says. Is anyone else seeing this behaviour?

It is random and doesn't happen with every email.

I suspect it is a bug that will get sorted and it is not a big deal to delete these draft emails. Just annoying.

Click to expand...

Maybes:

The mail server may be retaining drafts until you delete them. Gmail dies that. Explanation seems to be that if a draft is saved, you might want to edit it and send it later as anew message. TBird has a menu item offering exactly that.

A practice I follow, in addition to a zero Inbox every night, is I log into Gmail in the browser interface and empty the Trash and the Drafts labels (folders in GMail speak). Takes way less than a minute, and cleans up the detritus of the day.

Sorry, Not. Didn't see yours until I posted.

I've seen it on 115, doesn't happen on 119 though!

One solution might be to set TBird to save drafts to a local folder (under Local Folders, of course) you create and Name something like "Drafts" (creative, of me, no?). Maybe also set your Composition rules to save every 10 mins, instead of 5 (default).

Thanks all. I have been referring to my HP desktop machine but it is also happening on my wife's profile on our DELL laptop.

It's not a big deal to delete these drafts so I'll live with it and hope it gets fixed. Interesting that it doesn't happen on v119 so maybe there is hope.

@wiganken

My answer earlier was nearly right. I've tested and verified my method, JIC TBird doesn't straighten out the matter of deletion of drafts when the message is sent (assuming IMAP). This is really easy, and you don't have to delete any drafts or reset the number of minutes for saving a draft.

Right-click Local Folders and select New Folder. Name that folder as you wish. I'll call it Drafts for this discussion. Now open Account Settings > Copies & Folders > Drafts and Templates, and choose Other, click the down arrow in the selector window on the right, and navigate to your Local Folders > Drafts. That does it.

Now, this part is optional, but I find it appealing. I logged on to my server in my browser and clicked Settings > All Settings, and chose Labels (that's Folders in Gmail speak) in the top list and chose Hide for the server's copy of the Drafts folder, and then, way over on the right (had to stretch my small display) I un-ticked "Show in IMAP". As soon as I closed and re-opened my TBird, and it finished logging in, my old Drafts folder disappeared, and the only Drafts folder I had was in Local Folders, and that's where all drafts go from now on.

The final observation (the test) is that if you start an outgoing message and don't finish it within the time limit set in Settings > Composition > Auto save every ... (default is 5 minutes, and I've left it there, but making it fewer or more minutes works, too), a draft is saved to your new Drafts folder under Local Folders, and when you actually send that message, it is auto-deleted from the Drafts folder. I tried it in all possible combinations of waiting, and sending later, etc., and it seems to work just as you want it to. The only thing I didn't try is having multiple drafts of the same message. I figure that happens very rarely, so I didn't test for it.