Outlook emails get moved to drafts folder as I'm composing the email

My wife uses Microsoft's Outlook for her e-mail.  Previously she would 'draft' her e-mails and press 'send' and the e-mail would then be saved in her 'sent' folder.  More recently she was getting very frustrated with her out-going 

e-mails suddenly being sent to her 'draft's' folder after 5 or so seconds of being started and 

then being saved there. Further, the emails did not show up in the 'sent' folder after she had 

pressed 'send'. If you are experiencing the same issue then you may find the following helpful.

To try to resolve the issue I followed the actions suggested by the AI search engine but the outcome remained unchanged.  During this time I tried to send a number of test e-mails to my business account from my wife's business account and discovered that:

When a new email in Microsoft's Outlook is started, either by clicking on 'new' or ' reply', Outlook labels the email as a 'draft' version within a few seconds of starting to compose the e-mail.

When I pressed 'send' the email was actually sent to the recipient. The e-mail however is saved in the sender's 'draft' folder - but with no indication [that I could see anyway] that it has actually been sent.  Nothing appears in the sender's 'Sent' folder until .....

When the e-mail is received by the recipient the email that was saved in the  sender's 'draft' folder 

is then moved automatically to the 'sender's 'sent' folder, and deleted from the sender's 'draft' folder.

When sending an email from my wife's laptop to me it takes around an hour for me to receive it. Interestingly, its time of receipt is time stamped with the time it was actually sent.

So, in conclusion::

• it appears that Outlook 'holds' a 'sent' email - marked as a 'draft' - until it is received by the recipient: only then is it marked as 'sent'.
• The duration of the process from start to finish might only be milliseconds (which is how long it takes my wife to receive an e-mail from me) or (as with my wife's e-mails) an hour or so.

Hope the above is helpful.

The problem I am having is while it is in the draft mode My paperclip (attachment) is unavailable. I have to select the draft file which closes it and then I select to file to reopen the draft which opens the (attachment) paperclip. Very annoying.

The problem I am having is while it is in the draft mode My paperclip (attachment) is unavailable. I have to select the draft file which closes it and then I select to file to reopen the draft which opens the (attachment) paperclip. Very annoying.

Referring back to my message of April 22 2025 I created a new email as described in that post on my wife's laptop. The warning came up to say the email was saved as a 'draft' email - as described in my earlier post.

I then clicked on 'Insert' from the main Outlook menu which opened up a number of options including the 'attach file/peperclip' option. I clicked on the 'Attach file' / paperclip' option and browsed to find the file I wanted to attach to the email.

I clicked on the file and was immediately taken back to the draft email page - which showed my file was now an attachment to my email. Here I pressed 'send'. And, as described in my earlier post, I then had to wait 30 minutes or so but the email (with attachment) was received on my business PC.

On its receipt by my PC the draft version of the email (stored on my wife's laptop) was then transferred to her 'sent' folder.

Hope that helps.