My email disappeared while composing can I get it back?
Hi everyone, Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com.
Here's the question.
I was responding to an email, but my response disappeared.
Do you know a way I can get it back?
First, do Ctrl-S before you do anything else, just do Ctrl-S.
I'll explain why in a moment,
but that's like the very first thing you should try before you do anything else,
because many of the anything else could make that Ctrl-S not work.
So this is something that happens a lot.
It's really not at all uncommon for email to be in the process of being written.
And it doesn't matter whether you're using an email program or word processor even or
you're doing it on a website. Stuff happens.
There are some things that are more common than others.
And I'm actually going to show you one of the more common scenarios.
But there are simply things that happen
which mean then that there are places to look.
So let's flip over here to an email that's
already in composition that I've actually started writing.
You can see it's a very lengthy, very important email that I'm working on and.
All of a sudden, for no apparent reason, it disappears.
What happened? Right.
We don't know what happened.
If you, especially if you are a touch
typists or kind of a half touch typist, and you're not actually looking
at the screen or you're looking at the keyboard or you're just looking away.
It's very easy not to realize what just happened.
What literally just happened, as I typed very quickly Ctrl A and then
the enter key, Ctrl A means select everything
and then whatever you typed next replaces that everything.
That's why I suggest first thing to try is Ctrl Z. Ctrl Z brought it all back.
Ctrl Z is the keyboard shortcut
for Undo. The single most common reason email disappears while composing.
Is that you accidentally
selected more than you thought in some cases, it's really easy to do it
simply by accidentally typing Ctrl A and then without noticing you kept
on typing, replacing everything that had been selected. Ctrl Z brings it back.
Now, there are some other things to look for.
For example, here's my message.
It is, as I said, it's in composition if I close it.
It'll actually let me save it in drafts or not.
There are scenarios where switching away
from that window or closing that window or especially in online email,
opening a different browser window or navigating to a different email message,
it will automatically save whatever you're working on in the drafts folder.
Now, here in Thunderbird, of course, it's pretty obvious.
There's the drafts folder and there's the message that I was working on.
I can simply double click on it to bring it back up, and I can then continue
composing the message and send it on its way.
Definitely after you tried Ctrl Z look at or look for the drafts folder
in whatever email program or interface you're using.
The last straw that I'm going to throw out
for you to grasp that it's not going to work as often,
but it is something to at least try and that is simply close your email
program or close your browser and then open them up again.
Go back to where you were.
Go back to the drafts folder, see if something reappeared that seems
to have disappeared or looks to have disappeared at some point in the past.
Those are the three things that I suggest.
You try in order Ctrl-S Undo, the drafts folder just in case,
and then closing the program again, really just in case.
Now, the other thing that I suggest you
get into the habit of this is more of a preventative measure than it is
anything else is to periodically save your work in progress.
There's an old joke that you can tell how experienced a computer program or
a computer user is by how often they save their work in progress.
If you watch me typing a word document, for example, you'll see every so often I'm
just hitting Ctrl S, hitting Ctrl S.
I'm just saying save this to disk,
save this to disk, because at some point in my past
it disappeared and I couldn't get it back. Whereas saving to disk allows me to save
to the file that I'm working on, whatever it is I'm working on.
So the equivalent here do the Ctrl S and that just saves it to your draft folder.
If you're working with a web based email
system, there may be a different keystroke or
there may not be a keystroke at all, but it is something to be aware of.
Saving your work in progress, to avoid this problem or to at least
minimize the damage resulting from unexpected loss is
something that is well worth getting into the habit of.
And finally, since I know that some folks are kind of curious as to where the heck I
came up with this text, it looks like Lorem Ipsum, but it's not.
There's a site that I prefer to use called Bacon Ipsum,
and it is a kind of a spoof on Lorem Ipsum that just turns everything into meat.
So there are some more details in the companion article for this video.
I strongly suggest you have a look, a couple more straws to grasp,
a little more geeky, but they are things that you might look for.
This is all at Askleo.com/2630.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is Askleo.com.Thanks for watching.