Microsoft Outlook & lost email drafts??

B0bbyEwing

EDIT TO SAY: Phew, problem sorted. Managed to get the final edit. I can't delete this thread so carry on.


This has happened once before in Outlook although not as bad as this & not to an important email like this one.

Basically I've typed out an email  to my solicitor which with typing, deleting, more typing & more deleting has taken an hour or two to finish.

Then when I went to hit send it said it couldn't complete this action as the email has changed. I've had this before so I go to hit save so that it goes to my drafts & I can shut down Outlook, go back in & hit send again - except when I hit save I get the same error message saying this action can't be done as the message has changed.

I then notice the email in my drafts is from before I took a screen break about an hour ago & is only 1/3 - 1/2 of the finished version. It looks like I've totally lost the full version that I've literally just finished.

So the obvious question is - is there any way within Outlook or Gmail of getting the finished piece back? I'm going to suspect not but I need to ask all the same.

So if there isn't then why is Outlook doing this? I've noticed the same refusal to carry out an action in Outlook before - such as when I open an email that has images & I click on download pictures for the email. If I then try to delete the email it gives me a no-can-do error. To get round it I have to close the email, open another email, close that email & then I can THEN delete the email I tried to originally delete. 

That bit is getting a little off topic but just shows Outlook being a little !!!!!!-eyed at times. 



** If it helps any then when I open a browser & go in to my Drafts folder, the email shows in there & under recipient it says:

<solicitor>, Draft (in red), me 3.

Not sure what the 3 means. I'm hoping it means there's 3 draft versions & 1 of them is the final one.

PHK

For the future, a long email is best sent as a short email with a document attached (think of the email as a covering for the document)  

Not only will it prevent issues with versioning of drafts but has a number of other advantages. 

For example, the recipients mail server may be set to plain text only in which case your carefully crafted document will either look wrong or even have unreadable sections. 

Is less likely to be filtered into a junk or spam folder. 

Allows you to password protect the document if it contains personal information.  (Unless both your server and the recipients support the same encryption standard your email will go as text through all the servers in between. 

B0bbyEwing

PHK said:

For the future, a long email is best sent as a short email with a document attached (think of the email as a covering for the document)  

Not only will it prevent issues with versioning of drafts but has a number of other advantages. 

For example, the recipients mail server may be set to plain text only in which case your carefully crafted document will either look wrong or even have unreadable sections. 

Is less likely to be filtered into a junk or spam folder. 

Allows you to password protect the document if it contains personal information.  (Unless both your server and the recipients support the same encryption standard your email will go as text through all the servers in between. 

Thanks for the tip. Never considered that. Makes sense though.