4 Certain Solutions -“How to undo discard draft in Gmail”

Maybe you landed on this page because you are super frustrated and looking at your deleted or discarded draft in Gmail. Let me show you the 4-ways on How to undo discard draft in Gmail.

Officially If you have deleted or discarded your draft, You will have 30 seconds time to undo it. After that, it’s gone.

Whenever you get into this troublesome situation, you always think. Why on earth would the deleted draft go into the trash? You also start questioning Google Developers.

But the fact is, the draft email is an incomplete email, which can be edited and saved for the future. So logically if you have deleted or discarded the draft email, it will not be stored in the trash.

If Google starts doing this, he will be overwhelmed by a lot of extra capacity in servers to keep it.

Enough of talks! Let me show you 4 certain methods to recover your deleted or discard draft.

Solution-1 How to undo discard draft in Gmail

If you are working in Gmail and drafting an important email. Somehow by mistake, you have selected the delete icon or discard button. You have around 30 seconds to get it back.

As soon as you will discard your draft, there will be a pop up in the corner to select “undo”. Just select it and your email will get restore, where ever you left.

But what if you miss the 30 seconds or clicked somewhere else? Then this option will not be applicable. Look for second solution.

Solution-2 How to recover deleted drafts in Gmail using phone or other device

Nowadays, it’s pretty common, we all sync our Gmail on more than one devices. It may be a laptop, PC and mobile phone or Tablet. In case you have missed 30 seconds window to recover the discarded or deleted draft in Gmail. I am assuming, you were working on your laptop or PC while doing this.

Quickly, switch over to your Phone or Tablet. Switch on “Airplane mode”, Open your Gmail account. Go to the Drafts folder and you will see your deleted draft in it if you are lucky enough.

Actually, it takes some time to sync your Gmail account on all devices. So, if you were quick enough to do this, Congrats!! you have saved yourself.

Solution-3 Recover discarded draft in Gmail using Google vaults

This method is applicable for only those, who have access to a paid feature of Google vaults. If you have subscribed to Google Workspace (earlier G suite). You can log into Google vaults and search on your email address.

You will find the archived text, even if you have deleted it from your Gmail account. Actually, Google retains everything including deleted text in the Google vault for your account.

Solution-4 Recover Gmail draft using HxD software (Panacea)

If nothing works and still you are desperate to recover your discarded draft. Because it was so important, you can’t afford to lose it. Then this solution can help you.

You can call it a panacea solution in your difficult time. The only condition is, you must not close your browser with a Gmail account open and a little bit of extra effort to recover your deleted draft.

You need to scan the browser process memory for the discarded draft. It can be done with help of your HxD software, which is freeware Hex and disk editor.

Follow this step by step process, and I am confident that you can get your deleted Gmail draft back.

How to Install HxD software in Windows 10

Step 4.1 – Download HxD software and install it

• Visit the “https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/” website and download the latest HxD version (2.5.0.0), while writing this article.

• Select your preferred language installer. I will download the English version for this demo.

• Once the download completes, extract the zip file and run the HxD setup installer.
• Allow UAC (User access control) permissions. The installation wizard will launch.
• Select language for the installer. I will go with English
• Accept the license agreement and click Next in Wizard.
• Select destination location and click Next. I will suggest you keep it default.
• Accept default options on the next two screens of the wizard
• Select “Install”. It will take a couple of seconds to complete the installation of the HxD hex editor software

• Select “Finish“. It will automatically Launch HxD editor.

Recover your discarded draft

To show the process, I intentionally created a draft and deleted it. Checkout this below mentioned picture for your reference.

Step 4.2 – Launch HxD and open main memory

Make sure you don’t close the browser, where you have opened you Gmail account. I am using Chrome but steps are applicable to other browsers as well.

• Now Launch HxD, if it’s not open already.
• Go to Tools (in the menu) > choose the “Open main memory” option.

• Sort the process by click Process Name section. You will see all Chrome browser process currently running in memory.

Step 4.3 – Identify the process ID of Chrome or Browser

This is an important and tricky step. It’s really difficult to find out the process id of chrome because you will see many chrome processes. So which one is for Gmail?.

• To find out this, Go to Task manager > processes in your PC or laptop
• Look for the chrome process, which is consuming the most memory out of all the Google Chrome processes. Yes, you heard it right. Gmail, consumes a good amount of memory. Frankly speaking, this is the only way to get the process id, which I was able to figure out.

As you will see in the image. I have selected Google chrome which consuming 154.8 MB memory.

• Now right click on this process and select “Go to details” option.

• Note down the ID of this process and move to HxD window. In my case it is PID is “5492” as shown in image.

Step 4.4 – Select identified process id in HxD

• Now look for same identified process id in HxD window (5492 in my case). Then select “Ok”.

Step 4.5 – Press Ctrl + F and look for unique keyword of your email

Now you just need to search for any unique keyword you can remember in your draft email. This will help you to find your discarded draft quickly.

• Press Ctrl + F on your keyboard and enter any unique keyword you put in your draft email. I have given my name “Dev Sharma“, which was part of my draft email.

• Keep searching for the next word till the time you find your draft email text. I got it after three attempts. As you can see in the image, my discarded draft text is available as highlighted.

• Copy and paste the text to notepad or draft email again ;-). In most of the case, you will get at least 90% of the text untouched, but because you are recovering from memory. Few junk characters or missing text may need to re-type 😉

Take a deep breath, you are saved now!!

Video Tutorial

If you still have any doubt, you can watch this use video tutorial on “How to undo discarded draft in Gmail”.

Summary

In the worst-case scenario, if nothing works. Re-typing is the only option. But I am hopeful, out of the four, at least one method can help you to recover your discard draft in Gmail.

Please comment and let me know, which method made your day and saved your efforts.