How would you you improve gmail's draft email functionality?

The majority of users are professionals and/or students. So let's try to jot down some pain points/ needs associated with the draft feature, for the aforementioned persona.

Professionals/ Students needs

Before using the draft feature:

Wants to save an unsent message.
Wants to save the draft in an organised fashion.
Wants to share a draft.

After using the draft feature:

Wants to be reminded about the draft to take action.
Wants to quickly recall their train of thought before drafting.
Wants to compare the updates with previous versions of the drafts.
Wants to use the same draft format in the future.

The current save draft feature caters to the following needs:

Wants to save an unsent message: The save draft feature takes care of this.
Wants to save the draft in an organised fashion: The label feature allows users to label/ categorise drafts.

Some other needs we can look into, alongside the impact they would have, if resolved:

Wants to share a draft and collaborate with peers. Impact: MED
Wants to be reminded about the draft to take action. Impact: HIGH
Wants to quickly recall their train of thought which they had, before drafting. Impact: MED
Wants to compare the updates with previous versions of the drafts. Impact: MED
Wants to use the same draft format in the future. Impact: HIGH

Brainstorming Solutions

For the scope of this answer, I shall only look into the HIGH impact needs:

#1 Need: Wants to be reminded about the draft to take action.

Solutions:

Remind users about the draft and ask them if any action needs to be taken - moving to trash, sending, etc.
Allows users to automate the process of getting rid of idle drafts.

#2 Need: Wants to use the same draft format in the future.

Solutions:

Allow users to save components of the email as a template which can be used for future emails.

Metrics to Track

To track the success of the aforementioned solutions, we will keep track of the following metrics:

increase in weekly active users of the feature
decrease in % abandoned/idle drafts due to reminders
% drafts saved as templates
% saved drafts/ templates which are used once in the future
% saved drafts/ templates which are used more than once in the future

Summary

To improve the save draft feature, we looked at a couple of drafting associated needs of the target persona and priortized them based on impact. We then discussed solutions which involved reminding users about idle drafts, automating the process of deleting drafts & save templates of a draft for future use. We then looked at some metrics we would look at to gauge the success of our solutions.