Ask if you want to save the draft (do not save any drafts so as not to accumulate dozens of unnecessary drafts)

[Jerome-Herbinet]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

When writing an email and ...

• pressing the “Escape” key
• clicking on the close button
• clicking outside the compose window (in the dark area)...

... a draft is automatically saved.

In theory, this behavior may seem relevant, but in practice, it creates a rather annoying problem: you end up unintentionally accumulating a large number of drafts, 90% of which have no reason to exist... and frankly, in everyday professional use, it's very annoying. What a mess in this draft folder! :-D

In these three UI scenarios:

• a pop-up window should appear in ALL cases asking you whether you want to save the (new) draft or not.
• the window should not be minimized in the bottom right corner; minimization should ONLY occur when you have deliberately clicked on the "_" minimize button. In addition, I have noticed another problem, which is that if you have minimized the new email and then want to go somewhere else in Nextcloud, a browser popup appears asking if you want to leave the current page (or not), with the risk of losing the email. Frankly, I think a lot of people don't understand this behavior : “What the heck is this pop-up window?” they say ;-). I understand that this is related to the fact that the minimized email is technically an unvalidated form, but in practice, it's not easy for non-IT people to understand. In my opinion, this situation should be avoided.
• The same applies when reopening an existing draft. If, after modifying the draft, you exit it in one of the three ways described above, a pop-up should appear asking whether you want to save the changes or not. And same applies when minimizing compose window.

Describe the solution you'd like

Read above

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

Additional context

No response

[kesselb]

Thanks for your report 👍

@nimishavijay what do you think?

[nimishavijay]

Well, I think my question would be to ask: Why are there so many unsent mails in the first place? Is there anything blocking successfully sending a mail (and therefore "abandoning" it as a draft)? Or is it a bug that something is saved as a draft when in reality it is not (for eg, it is in the drafts folder even after it's already sent, or multiple copies are being created)?

a pop-up window should appear in ALL cases asking you whether you want to save the (new) draft or not.

I would disagree as that would disrupt a very common flow, i.e checking another mail while composing, which is limited by the current UI of Mail (eg. You're replying to a colleague and need to reference a mail from 2 days ago). Adding a popup every time you exit the composer screen would introduce a lot of friction here.

the window should not be minimized in the bottom right corner; minimization should ONLY occur when you have deliberately clicked on the "_" minimize button.

Again, doing this would get in the way of people quickly switching between composing and browsing. If every time you want to check another mail or email address while composing, it would not be ideal to have to go into the drafts folder every time to retrieve that mail to continue composing.

In addition, I have noticed another problem, which is that if you have minimized the new email and then want to go somewhere else in Nextcloud, a browser popup appears asking if you want to leave the current page (or not), with the risk of losing the email.

This I would agree, this popup can be shown only when you are exiting when the composer is still open (i.e you're refreshing/navigating away from the page). Once the minimized version is shown, it is implied that it is a draft so showing this popup would just cause confusion whether the mail is saved as a draft or not.

I do agree that there are issues with draft management in Mail, but I don't think introducing a pop-up is the way to go, instead we can look into the different ways drafts are behaving abnormally :)

[Jerome-Herbinet]

Thanks for your reply @nimishavijay !
I agree that my suggestions aren't perfect and that there is room for improvement in draft management. Clearly, I've been dealing with unwanted drafts in Nextcloud Mail for years, whereas with Thunderbird, it almost never happens.