Why do Gmail Templates appear as Drafts?

If you have enabled Gmail’s Templates feature, you will see Draft messages for each of your Gmail Templates. If you delete these drafts, the corresponding templates will also be deleted from your Gmail account!

Unfortunately, the Gmail API exposes templates as regular drafts, and does not provide any distinguishing attributes indicating that these messages are drafts. Furthermore, the message source also contains no distinguishing attributes, and it is not possible to differentiate between Template drafts and regular drafts. Gmail also exhibits this behavior over IMAP, so all other email clients (such as Apple Mail and Microsoft Outlook) are equally affected.

We’ve submitted a bug report to Google requesting some differentiating marker be added to these drafts, so they can be hidden in the app. Please star this bug to express your interest in this issue.

In addition, as a feature request, we’ve also asked for Template Management API. If you’re interested in being able to sync your Gmail Templates with Mimestream’s Templates, please star this as well!