Email Drafts Primer Tutorial

Email Drafts Primer Tutorial

Are you a big emailer? Yes, well, um, yes, well, ar, yes, today may be a bit rudimentary for you … well, it’s horses for courses I say … you might even say it takes all kinds to make a world … but I think that I couldn’t possibly comment here.

Use Gmail a lot myself and have been aware of the special qualities of Draft emails, and think that sharing this would be good. It came up recently regarding a student who couldn’t get an Internet connection but had a Gmail browser window open already, and neither of us had any leads or USB memory sticks nor floppies … but there was electricity, so our laptops both worked, and I had means to get an Internet connection. How could we get a document from the student’s laptop to mine (ie. “teacher’s laptop” below)?

Well, Gmail (and probably Hotmail and others) have a Draft folder, and the purpose of this Draft folder is as a place to have emails before they are sent, and Gmail, at least, saves to this Draft folder, as you construct your email, on a regular basis. So, we (and I warn here, that trying to recreate this scenario again later I had problems, and think now that I may have had a Dallas moment … it did happen … but maybe it relied on a snippet of Student laptop Internet connection … but you may want to try it yourself?!):

• At the student laptop we arranged that the data required to be seen by the teacher was in the buffer (or clipboard) by opening the data in a text editor and used a right click Copy (or menu Copy click) to fill the clipboard with the data
• At the student laptop we reopen that Gmail tab in the web browser from a previously connected session via Gmail which uses the student’s login
• At the student laptop the student shapes to Compose a new email but leaves out the To: bit, while filling in the Subject and Body (which was what was needed, and was arranged via an Edit->Paste of data of the first step … or skip the first step and use the paper clip icon way of Attaching the file of interest to the Draft email … or if data is binary (ie. not ascii readable data) or if there is too much data … emails can have attachments up to 3mB typically, but depends on the setup)
• At the student laptop the student just waited for the Saved wording to appear (am now having trouble here in recreating this scenario with no connection … my Dallas moment!), or preempted the matter by using Save functionality (which still works despite the lack of connectedness) … not Send (remember, we don’t have a connection at the student end)
• At the teacher’s laptop we got the student to open up Gmail in a web browser via Gmail and to log in with their login
• At the teacher’s laptop, the student clicked the Drafts folder and opened up the email with the apt subject (cute, huh?!)
• At the teacher’s laptop, the student selected all the Body section and went Edit->Copy (or Downloaded the Attachment … if that’s how you roll?)
• At the teacher’s laptop, the student logged out of the student’s Gmail account
• At the teacher’s laptop, the teacher opened up a text editor such as Text Wrangler and went File->New and Edit->Paste to acquire the required information that the student needed to send (or use File->Open the email attachment file in the Downloads folder)

These techniques can be useful for sending information to yourself, in “midair”, with email, as well, especially if you can’t get an Internet connection now, but need to note something down for later, when you will be able to get an Internet connection. If the student is nowhere near the person they want to send the data to, and they are desperate, in order to succeed they would have to tell the teacher their Gmail login email address and password, which is not a good practice, although the student could change their password they next time they are connected.

So, the lesson here is to leave Gmail windows as your laptop opens, as you go out and hope for WiFi Internet connections in the big wide world, but where you may find that you cannot find one. All may not be lost to collaborate, even without the Internet connection.

Of course the other use of the Drafts folder is for times when you do not know the Sender’s email address, but will know later. So store the whole email contents and Save it into the Drafts folder. When you get to know the email address of the person you want to send it to, open the Drafts folder email, fill out the To section with the Sender email address and click the Send button … if your connection is okay the email should be sent, and if the Sender email address is okay and the contents are legitimate it should arrive at the Sender’s Inbox.

Word of warning with these Draft Gmail “folder” thoughts is that the Draft “folder” is particular to the device you are using. So a “Draft” on a laptop at home will not be seen by a “Draft” (with the same Gmail login) in a WiFi connected iPad “on the go”, or at the destination either, but would be there for that previous laptop you were using.

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