I’m probably lacking imagination but I can’t think of a reason why I’d want to send an email to the Drafts app. Other than composing them, I only do the following things with emails:
My inbox hovers very close to Inbox Zero most of the time.
Why would I need to send an email to Drafts?
I probably wouldn’t, but I could see a use case where you get an email and you’d like to put it into Drafts to save it, workshop some language, etc. before you do something else with it. Copy/paste works for that, but an email integration could be nice.
It feels like an edge case to me.
The way I have used it in the past is Drafts would be the middleman if you were compiling a list of data, such as links.
Share to Draft, clean up, send as email…
It’s easier than copying and pasting, especially on mobile. I’m sending emails to Todoist to add tasks, for example, as it’s easier while already in the email app to just forward an email directly to a corresponding project (each project gets its own unique email address in Todoist) than to copy/paste/enter all the details into Todoist. I imagine the Drafts use case scenario would be similar.
In the Mail app, I just select the subject line and from there I can send it directly to Reminders.
It’s going to be nice for people who use Zapier or another automation tool. Receive some input > send a message or format a bit of data > send to Drafts > have Drafts transform and send to a local Mac app.
For most people, Drafts is way easier to set up than their own custom endpoint to receive data and bring it down to their local system.
I’m not saying that is something you want to do, just explaining what jumped out at me.
It could be useful if you wanted to get something into Drafts from a non-Apple device.
I’ve started using it for when I need to compile information from emails into a document. Forwarding all the replies to a topic means all the text is where I do my writing. This is also easy on mobile and means less switching between apps and it’s faster than copy pasting manually.
Some people use Drafts for PKM, so it could be used to “file” emails.
I use Drafts as an informal To-Do list
The new Email to Drafts features is great in that regard.
If I want to have more detail in a “To-Do” entry, now I can have the whole email in Drafts for reference rather than just a short task description
It might not be you sending an email to Drafts, but rather something automated. Further, imagine an email being sent to you and then you just forward it to Drafts. I think the latter is more prevalent than the former.
It might make some sense to someone, but not to me. My text (mostly for omnifocus) starts in drafts, it certainly does not end up there.
Would have liked to see some other features before this one, such as the ability to sync to webdav/nextcloud f.e.
Maildrop sounds very niche and proprietary.
1 - Email-to-Drafts is not a niche feature at all; it is a universal means of information exchange so it opens up Drafts to interconnection with an infinite number of other apps and app-like sources.
2 - WebDav support does exist - Services | Drafts User Guide
ad 1: I understand the options it wiuld bring, just not sure it would work for me. Drafts is where text starts for me, nothing else.
ad 2: Webdav support for actions does exist, not webdav sync support, we’re still sandboxed into the Apple eco system. I would really like to take drafts notes out of there as well (have almost all my data out now, drafts and some smaller apps still in there unfortunately)
I’ve been using this more and more as I’m finding that I have a lot of apps to which I’d like to be able to email text, and Drafts actions mean it connects all the apps I use to this email drop-in.
Ooooh this is a good one! Definitely going to add this as a workflow.
Drafts already can write to webdav. Nextcloud support would be cool. He recently added Airtable and Mastodon, so he’s probably open to requests for new integrations.
If you meant inbound support from those sources, that’d be interesting. I think email is the first remote inbound integration he’s done. It’s a good place to start, IMO, since the sync is simple and he doesn’t have to figure out how to handle a flood of pre-existing files.
I meant sync to nextcloud or webdav, it now only supports icloud sync. I know it can write to webdav, which also allows it to write to nextcloud.
I see. That’d be nice. I think he’s pretty set against offering multiple sync backends, but he chews through so many features he might change his mind…
To speed up processing of emails, I’ll spend about a minute on each email message. As I go through my inbox:
Then at the end, I can go through the few messages that made it to Drafts, clean up the info, and then send it to Obsidian. Also go through Things and clean up to-do to have only the necessary info.