Draft Rot Tracker

Two surfaces, both quiet

The dot. A small blue dot beside Drafts in the left nav whenever something has gone stale. It is ambient information: it never animates, never interrupts, and costs nothing to ignore.

The chip. A small corner panel listing what has gone stale, shown at most once per day, and never twice for the same draft on the same day. That cadence lives in the detection engine rather than the interface, so it cannot drift as the UI changes.

Why there is no Send button

There is deliberately no one-click Send now and no one-click Discard. Both are irreversible actions on a message you have not looked at in days and cannot read from a summary panel. Sending an unfinished email is exactly the kind of mistake the rest of this catalog exists to prevent.

The actions are Open, Snooze a week, and Ignore. Open takes you to the draft, where sending or discarding is your decision with the text in front of you.

What it skips

Drafts younger than three days. Drafts with neither a recipient nor a subject, which are scratch notes rather than unsent messages. Anything you snoozed, until the snooze expires. Anything you marked ignore, permanently.

One honest limit

A browser extension can only read what Gmail has rendered. It learns your drafts by reading the Drafts list when you visit it, and caches their ages locally from there. On a fresh install the dot stays dark until you open Drafts once. After that it stays current every time you pass through.

Permissions

Gmail only, plus local storage. It runs on Gmail and nowhere else. Draft subjects and dates are cached in your own browser profile so ages survive a reload, and are deleted when you uninstall.