Shared Drafts

Shared drafts let your team collaborate on email replies before sending them. Any teammate can start a draft, and others can pick it up, edit it, and send it — so you can work together on tricky responses without stepping on each other’s toes.

Creating a Draft

There are two ways to start a draft:

  • New conversation — Click New Message and start composing. Your message is saved as a draft automatically as you type.
  • Reply — Open a conversation and click Reply. The reply is saved as a draft while you work on it.

In both cases, the draft is visible to your whole team. Teammates viewing the conversation will see that a draft exists and who started it.

Draft Locking

When you open a draft to edit it, Jelly locks it to you. This prevents two people from editing the same draft at the same time and overwriting each other’s work.

While you hold the lock:

  • Your teammates see your name and avatar next to the draft, along with an “is editing this draft” indicator
  • Other teammates can see the draft’s contents (recipients, subject, body) but cannot edit it
  • The lock is maintained automatically while you have the editor open

Releasing the Lock

The lock is released when you:

  • Navigate away from the conversation
  • Close the browser tab
  • Lose your connection (after a short timeout)

Once released, the draft becomes available for anyone else to pick up.

Claiming a Stale Draft

If a teammate’s lock goes stale — for example, they closed their laptop without navigating away — the draft becomes available again. You can click Resume editing to claim it and continue where they left off.

When you take over a draft from a teammate, this is recorded in the conversation’s activity log so your team has a clear audit trail of who worked on it.

Who Sent What

Jelly tracks three distinct roles for every draft:

  • Started by — the teammate who originally created the draft
  • Last edited by — the teammate who most recently made changes
  • Sender — the teammate who actually clicked Send

These can all be different people. For example, Alice might start a draft reply, Bob could pick it up and refine it, and Carol might review and send it. The sent message shows Carol as the sender, while the draft history reflects that Alice started it and Bob last edited it.

The “sender” on a sent message always reflects who clicked Send, not who originally composed the draft. This matters if your team needs to know who took responsibility for sending a particular reply.

Provenance Indicators

When you view a draft that you aren’t currently editing, Jelly shows you who has been working on it:

  • “Started by Alice” — tells you who created the draft
  • “Last edited by Bob” — tells you who made the most recent changes (shown only when different from the creator)

These indicators help you understand a draft’s history at a glance, even if the original author is no longer online.

Tips

  • Check presence first — Before claiming a draft, glance at the presence indicators to see if a teammate is actively working on it
  • Coordinate with comments — If you want to suggest changes to someone else’s draft, leave a comment on the conversation rather than waiting for them to release the lock
  • One draft per reply — Each position in a conversation thread can have only one draft at a time, so your team naturally converges on a single response
  • Discard with care — Discarding a draft deletes it for everyone, not just you. Make sure your team is done with it before discarding