Same problem as I'm seeing others have.  While writing an email, the page does a double jump and and a message comes up saying 'saved to draft'...it doesn't actually save, and I never asked it to.  The jumping of the page and the flashing of this message is getting annoying.  Any ideas how to correct this??  Thanks.

@Mainecoon Cats

Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, did not provide an option to disable the "auto save to drafts" feature, and they did not provide an option to change the frequency with which messages are saved (it happens every three minutes).

It's strange.  There must have been a Microsoft update recently as this 'auto save' problem only began about a week ago.  Truly annoying!  Thanks for your comments.

@Mainecoon Cats:

Microsoft is rolling out an upgrade to Hotmail during September. Here is a link to the official Microsoft announcement :

http://windowslivehelp.com/solutions/supportmgr/archive/2009/08/28/Wave4-M1-Changes.aspx

A "professional" software development company would put some kind of visual indicator into Hotmail that would be displayed at the time of sign-on (if the server that runs ones Hotmail account had been upgraded to the new release) ... thus keeping customers informed of the changes as they actually occur on the server used by the customer. Microsoft chose not to implement that helpful notification for their customers. Thanks Microsoft!!!!

I hope the September "upgrade" is a downgrade back to where we were last month before the auto-save nuisance began.  Microsoft, pleeease tell us you ARE working to correct this thing!!   

Mainecoon Cats - that doesn't sound right - do you know know what screen resolution you're computer is using? You can see this in Vista by:

1. Right clicking on your desktop, then selecting "Personalize"
2. Click on "Display Settings" in the window that pops up
3. A new window will open and display the Resolution there.

Thank you.  The resolution is set to 'high'.  My husband's computer is doing this 'saving draft' thing too.  I guess, it's part of some automatic update Microsoft did.  I don't mind the 'save draft' feature, it's the screen blinking and jumping while I'm writing an email that is annoying.  The idea of not accidently losing what I'm writing by saving a draft is good, but the 'jumpy' screen when it saves needs to be smoothed out if possible.

Thanks for your input.

There should be some numbers below the bar as well - 1024x768 or 1280x1024. Could you let me know what that numbers are?

And this is in fact becuase of our lated release - we added the auto save draft feature in that release.

MSFT Brandon M:

My screen also "jumps" when the "auto save to drafts" feature kicks in (after 3 minutes) and saves the message I am composing. The "jump" appears to be caused by the screen being re-rendered just after a new message is saved to drafts.

Normally, I do not have any drafts saved in my Drafts Folder, so the font of the Draft folder's name is regular. Not completely sure, but perhaps the "jump" is caused when a message is first saved, and the font of the Draft's folder name is changed to bold. The bold font takes up a bit more screen space, and perhaps the re-rendering of the screen (with the Drafts folder name changed to bold) causes the preceived "jump".

The "jump" is small, but does seem to be cause when the screen is re-rendered and there is some slight change in the size of some text on the page .... cannot tell exactly where. Perhaps you could capture the screen (and corresponding HTMP) both before and immediately after the screen is re-rendered and look for changes.

My screen's resolution is 1024x768 .... cannot use a higher resolution.

Thanks very much for your feedback.  I'll set my resolution at 1024x768 and see if that calms it down a bit.  Have a nice day.

@MSFT Brandon M:

Follow up to previous post ...

I did the following .... started a new message and took a screen shot.

Waited 3 minutes for the message to be saved (observed the "jump"), and took another screen shot.

Compared the two screen shots.

I was wrong about the bold font of the Drafts folder name causing the jump.

What I did observe is that after the message was saved, a one-line notice appeared just under the action-bar (at top of screen). This notice said: "Your message was saved in Drafts at HH:MM"

The insertion of this one line notice, and the re-rendering of the page, causes the message being composed to "jump" downward.

I waited another three minutes ... with the notice still at the top of the page .... to determine if the jump would again occur. Since the notice remained at the top of the with only the time changed, I expected the jump to not occur. But I was wrong. The jump did occur when the message was saved a second time.

What I observed, but could not capture in a screen save, was that something (one line) quickly appeared just above the text box where the message was being composed (and just below the action bar with font name, text size, Bold, Italics, Underline, etc) .... or perhaps something (one line) was inserted as the first line in the text box .... then it quickly disappeared .... causing the text of the message being composed to jump down one line, then back up one line.

You may have to dig into the HTML that is generated when the 3 minute timer expires and the message is saved .... but I suspect you will find that something is being added that causes the text of the composed message to jump down and then back up.

Hope this helps.

Mainecoon Cats - What was your resolution set at before you started trying 1024x768?

Langware - thanks for the additional info.  I'm not seeing this jump when auto-save kicks in, but I'm also going to do some additional testing based off the descriptions you posted.

@Brandon M:

I repeated my experiment just to be sure.

Again, the first time the message was saved, a one-line information notice was inserted stating: "Your message was saved in Drafts at HH:MM". When that one-line was inserted, the entire text box where the message was being composed "jumped" down.

I waited an additional 3 minutes for the next auto save, and this time the text box with the message being composed did not jump (as I originally expected).

So, perhaps the "jump" that people are observing is due to the initial insertion of the one-line notice.

I did this experiment on IE8 with no scripts or add-ons installed.

MSFT Brandon M:  My resolution was set at 1280 x 800.

@MSFT Brandon M:

I looked through the HTML used for the Compose New Message page and found this line of code:

autoSaveDraft : { interval: 3 }

Looks like this line controls the 3 minute interval in which messages are saved. It should be trivial for the Hotmail Product Team to develop an option to allow each user to set this value.

Others may be developing a script to do the same. No response from Microsoft (to customer's requests for options to "save to drafts") will most likely result in user scripts to do the same.