There is in hotmail a little icon that is a pencil that is “edit”. It appears only in drafts. When your Mom opens the email in the draft folder she needs to click this icon to finish and complete the draft.

As soon as the edit “pencil” is clicked, a “send” button will appear in the email.

Thank you very much. I've been using Gmail for many years and even drafts have the "send" button available, so I couldn't figure out why she was having so much trouble. Now I can walk her through it in the morning and we'll both have learned something.

('send to'____), the message in the drafts folder does not have a 'send' button, just a faint 'reply' or 'forward' symbol.

I just tried and that's what happened in my system.

Make sure she has completed the message, fills in the subject line & recipient email address line before hitting 'send.'

I hope that helps, good luck, ~ A. Blue.

Is my email address in the "to" portion? She said it was, so that wasn't the problem. I think pachamama has it right: She needs to click on the pencil to edit and complete the email, then she'll be able to send it. Thanks for your input!

is fairly new, to me at least. Now I recall futzing around once, finally clicking the pencil & I could finish & send.

Glad it's solved, and you both can communicate!

She's on the other side of the country and email is how I share pictures and videos with her. I'd love to get her on Zoom or Hangouts or some other video service, but first she'd need a device that can handle it and that's an issue.

I'll take what I can get in terms of communication, though. Being able to retrieve a draft and actually send it is a big deal for her, so I'm happy.

How I wish I could be with mine, or talk to her but she's passed. Miss her every day.

It's something I prepare myself for and I know how lucky we are that she's still here. We're both very aware that time is slipping away all too quickly.

... I couldn't reproduce it! I created a whole bunch of drafts... no edit pencil. No I know why it shows up only "randomly." I've been wondering forever!

Zoom allows screen sharing with a click of a button.

That way you can see what she's looking at

She has a desktop PC that apparently doesn't have a camera and she refuses to own a cell phone (go figure!), so we can't Zoom or do any other kind of video call. It's all either voice-only calls or email, unfortunately. At least we've had help figuring out the email draft mystery!

Maybe doesn't even need a mic ... Not sure, but quite possibly you can still connect a meeting with the app and use screen share with neither a mic nor camera. Then you talk on the phone at the same time.

It's worth a shot if the simpler instructions above don't work.

Long-distance instructions are a little harder than in-person ones, so I'm not sure how I'd help her set that up without being there. Something tells me she'd say it's "too complicated" and pass on the idea. What we've been doing works, so we'll probably just keep things the way they've been.

I'm sure the simple solution of using the pencil edit icon will work just fine. If not... well, I know where to find you helpful sorts when I need you. Bwahahaha!

And I'll just point out that if you set this up, you can then always help her with computer problems because she can share her screen with you any time.

Don't have to switch to using it for your talks (in fact if she has no mic either, you can't), just for computer issues. Talk on the phone while she shows you her screen with Zoom

https://zoom.us/client/latest/ZoomInstaller.exe

That's if the edit thing doesn't work.

Also, you can go through the same steps she would using that link, even if you already have Zoom on your machine.

Windows 8 and Windows 10 both have very easy to use screen capture features. Window's 10 has shift/windows-logo/S to capture then paste with good ol' ctrl/V. You'd need to walk her through getting to Snip in Windows 8. Anyway, she could take a picture of what she's seeing and send it to you. You could post it here if necessary.