Editing a draft before it goes
Subject, body and recipients are yours to change. The mailbox the reply will leave from is not, because that was settled by the mailbox's role and the thread it belongs to. What you leave on the screen is exactly what is sent — Connect does not rewrite over an edit, and does not quietly regenerate one after you have touched it.
Editable, and not#
| Field | Yours? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Subject | Yes | Threading follows the canonical thread, not the subject line, so changing it does not split the conversation in Connect |
| Body | Yes | The obvious one. Your text wins outright |
| Recipients, copies | Yes | Adding a colleague is a normal correction; each added address is still checked against compliance before the send runs |
| Attachments | Yes | They come from the same file service described on Email attachments |
| Sending mailbox | No | Decided by the mailbox's role and the thread. A reply that arrives from a different address than the customer wrote to reads as a mistake, because usually it is one |
| Signature | Follows the mailbox | It belongs to the mailbox record, not to the message |
The immovable field is the interesting one. Mail identity is not a per-message choice: alignment between the sending domain and its published policy is what stops a reply landing in a spam folder, and the records that govern it — SPF, DKIM, DMARC — have their own pages under Technology reference. Letting a person retarget a single reply at a different mailbox would put that outside anybody's control.
What your edit does to the record#
- The text becomes the message. There is no merge, no second pass and no model review of what you wrote.
- The edit is attributable. The audit trail holds what was decided, by what, under which rule, and what happened, so a reply that went out in your words is identifiable as yours months later.
- Compliance still runs. Suppression, unsubscribe and do-not-contact are checked before the send, on the recipients as they stand after your edit — not as they stood when the reply was written.
- Autonomy still applies. Editing does not approve. A reply under
ask_before_sendwaits for the approval whether or not you rewrote every line of it.
Edit or start again#
- Edit
- The reply is right in substance and wrong in a detail: a date, a name, a paragraph too many. Fastest path, and your judgement is the final word.
- Regenerate
- The thread has moved on, or the material the reply should have used has changed — you added a Knowledge source, corrected a memory, recorded a direction. Editing cannot pick those up; a fresh pass can.
- Reject
- The reply should not exist. Rejecting records that decision against the thread and stops the engine immediately producing the same thing again.
The trap is editing a stale reply into shape. If the customer wrote again while it waited, your careful edit is still an answer to the older message, and it will read as though nobody was paying attention. Needs You shows when a thread has moved on for exactly this reason; the trade is set out on Regenerating a draft.
After it goes#
An edit is only reversible before the send. Once the provider has acknowledged the message there is no unsend — that is a property of email, not of Connect, and no honest documentation will tell you otherwise. What exists afterwards is the record: what was sent, from which mailbox, released by whom, with the acknowledgement that proves it went.
Between approval and acknowledgement there is a real third state, shown as *uncertain* rather than guessed either way. That window, and how it resolves, is the subject of Proof that a message was sent.
Questions#
If I edit and then walk away, does it send itself?
No. Under ask_before_send the reply waits for an approval; under draft_only it never asks at all. An edit changes the content, never the permission.
Can I change which mailbox it comes from?
Not on the message. Change the mailbox's role, or reply from the mailbox you want, both of which are decisions about the workspace rather than about one reply — see Mailbox roles.
Will Connect learn from the way I rewrote it?
Not from the edit itself. Memory changes when somebody records something at a tier, and that is deliberately an explicit act: a system that silently generalised from every correction would drift in ways nobody could audit.