You Can Now Draft An Email In Google Docs and Send It To Gmail

Google is rolling out a Google Docs update that lets Workspace and legacy G Suite users collaborate on Gmail drafts. Engadget reports: Open the email draft template (Insert > Building Blocks > Email draft) and your colleagues can comment or make suggestions. You won't always need to know recipients' email addresses, either, as you can mention people by name. When you're ready to send the email, you just need to click a button to open a Gmail compose window and finalize the message. Docs will automatically populate all the relevant fields.

The feature will take up to 15 days to reach companies on Rapid Release domains, and will start reaching more cautious Scheduled Release customers on March 22nd. There's no mention of availability for personal use.

Wow. I bet people were begging for this.

[MikeDataLink]

They spent millions developing this too I bet.

Re:

[Heir Of The Mess]

Is this meant to be a competitor for creating a draft Microsoft Word document in Microsoft Teams and co-editing it with your colleagues?

Re: Wow. I bet people were begging for this.

[e3m4n]

Which they have had. The only add-on I see is sending mail directly from the collaboration document instead of copy/paste into gmail. It saves all of 2 clicks and a wrist movement with the mouse.

Re:

[Askmum]

I remember back in the day a new coworker writing all his mails in a Word document and attaching that to the mail, instead of writing the text in the email.
He didn't last long.

Re:

[flyingfsck]

Who would not want 100 MB one line emails from HR or Marketing?

Re:

[arglebargle_xiv]

And this random fart from Google is newsworthy because... ?

Big deal

[nagora]

I can draft an email in Emacs and send it from Emacs to anyone with a Gmail account. This is called "sending email" and it's a solved problem.

Re:

[PPH]

Zawinski's Law [wikipedia.org]

Re:

[flyingfsck]

Sending email is never a solved problem. Letts Law: "All programs evolve until they can send email".

Re:

[Darren Hiebert]

So this is, basically, just a slight variation on Zawinski's Law [wikipedia.org].

Hallelujah. What a time to be alive.

[greytree]

Google need to be broken up.

So some of the clever people working for them can go and work on something good.

Re:

[DontBeAMoran]

You think that's funny, but in the future all operating systems are going to do this.

Sent from my 2027 Mac mini.

Re:

[CaptQuark]

The problem is most people don't know how to turn off the tag line at the end of their messages sent from their phone. Also, some people see you sent the message from your phone and forgive some common email practices like spell checking, capitalization, or removing huge attachments in a reply.

I don't use my phone for creating or responding to email messages, but removing attachments for replies would be one of the first things I would configure if it is possible.

Re: Signature

[e3m4n]

Iphone asks if you want to include attachments when replying or forwarding. I think it might be solved for you. I cant imagine android being that out of step on mail.

Re:

[ArsenneLupin]

I cant imagine android being that out of step on mail.

And yet, many Android Email apps often fail on simple obvious tasks:

• use a sane font, not one which jumbles up alignment
• allow to easily reply to a mail, without needing 3 extra clicks to confirm "now I really want to start entering my reply"
• respect common practices such as line length
• not randomly drop spaces between words
• not spontaneously open attachments on received mails

Anybody knows an Android mail app which gets all of these right?

Re:

[ArsenneLupin]

O, and I forgot:

• not leak your email username and password to Putin

Title's all wrong. I can't do that.

[mmell]

Go read TFA at Endgadget [engadget.com]. To quote:

The feature will take up to 15 days to reach companies on Rapid Release domains, and will start reaching more cautious Scheduled Release customers on March 22nd. There's no mention of availability for personal use.

So, yeah, I'll bet a lot of enterprise customers are looking for this. I'm not; but then again, they're not planning to let me have it as a plain old end-user.

Gen-Z/Alpha scratch their heads ...

[fahrbot-bot]

"E.... Mail...?" :-)

Exactly what I needed

[nospam007]

20 people committeeing what a 50 word email should look like.

Must be a dream for control freaks who can use this to edit every single email anybody sends out.

Copy/paste was too much

[pchasco]

Theyâ(TM)ve eliminated the requirement for a use to copy the contents of a google doc and paste into an email. Life changing.

Re:

[ArsenneLupin]

copy the contents of a google doc and paste into an email

. Unless they blocked copy-paste via Javascript, which these services often do :-(

As the saying goes

[fibonacci8]

This email could've been a meeting.

Yes, for those times I can access Drive but

[ayesnymous]

can't access Gmail.

Amazing technology from the 1980's.

[OrangeTide]

You could draft an email in PICO, emacs or Vi, save it anywhere even onto a floppy. Then send it with PINE or elm or sendmail.
File systems were kind of amazing stuff. So amazing that we named operating systems [wikipedia.org] after the fact that they could manage disks.