Shared drafts

Two people writing the same reply at the same time is the classic shared inbox failure. ShareMail prevents it with a lock rather than a warning.

How it works

Start a reply on a conversation and it becomes a shared draft. Teammates looking at the same conversation see it appear, live, as you type, and they see your name on it. The list marks the row with a red Draft: prefix so nobody starts a second one.

They cannot edit it. The draft belongs to whoever typed in it first, and the reader tells them so, with a one-click way to take it over if they need to.

Taking over a draft

The banner on a locked draft reads “Draft assigned to Sarah. Assign it to yourself to edit it”, and Assign to me does that. From then on the draft is yours and Sarah sees it locked. The takeover is recorded in the timeline as “took over the shared draft”, so nobody wonders where their half-written reply went.

The draft’s owner and the conversation’s assignee are two different things. Taking over a draft does not reassign the conversation, and being assigned a conversation does not hand you someone else’s draft. Ownership of the work and ownership of the words can differ, and usually should.

Gmail stays in sync

Drafts sync both ways. Edit the draft in Gmail on your phone and ShareMail adopts the change; write it here and it is in your Gmail drafts. If both sides change before they meet, the ShareMail edit wins. An unsent Gmail draft on a thread shows an Unsent draft chip when you open it here.

Drafts do not make noise

Saving a draft does not mark a read thread unread, and does not push the conversation to the top of the list. A draft is not activity: it is you, mid-sentence. Autosave runs every few seconds and whenever you leave a field; the note under the editor says “Draft auto-saved”.

The Drafts view in the sidebar lists every conversation with an unsent reply on it, anyone’s, so a draft left over the weekend is findable.

What ends a draft

Sending it, discarding it, or archiving the conversation. Archive, trash and mark-as-spam all discard any outstanding draft, on the theory that a conversation you are closing is not one you were about to answer. The exception is Send & archive, which keeps the draft in reserve for the undo window.

Undo send

A sent reply waits briefly before it really goes, and the toast offers Undo for that window. Undo puts the draft back where it was. The window is a setting on each shared inbox, ten seconds by default and up to sixty, in Settings → Inboxes → Edit; set it to zero to send immediately. See Compose and reply.