Otto can read my email but can't save drafts: "Drafts folder doesn't exist"

Modified on Tue, 4 Aug at 3:45 PM

Otto reads your inbox perfectly. He summarises what came in, finds the enquiry you were looking for, tells you who is still waiting on a reply. Then you ask him for a draft and it fails, every single time, with something like "Drafts folder doesn't exist", or the raw server line "[TRYCREATE] Folder doesn't exist", or, if your Gmail is in Dutch, "Gmail meldt dat de map voor concepten niet bestaat" and "de map Drafts bestaat niet". Nothing appears in Gmail, so the test email was not saved. If that is what you are looking at, stop what you are doing: this was our bug, not your setup, and it is fixed.

Is this you?

If the way you would describe it out loud is "Otto can read my email but cannot save a draft", this is your article. The pattern is very specific and very consistent:

Reading mail works. Searching, summarising, quoting a client's message back to you: all fine.
Every attempt to save a draft or a reply fails, and it fails the same way on the second and third try.
Your Gmail account language is set to something other than English.
Everything you can check looks correct. Check it on the account returns "Connected - the address and password work", and the Gmail (app password) card under Tool access (optional) shows a green On badge.

All of those checks were telling you the truth. The problem was somewhere else entirely.

What was actually going wrong

Gmail names your Drafts folder in your account's own language. On a Dutch account that folder is called Concepten, not Drafts. On German it is Entwürfe, on French Brouillons, on Spanish Borradores.

Otto used to look only for the English name. When he went to save your draft he asked your mail server for a folder called Drafts, the server answered honestly that no such folder existed, and the save failed. That server answer is exactly where "[TRYCREATE] Folder doesn't exist" comes from: in IMAP, the language your mail server speaks, that means "there is no mailbox with that name, create it first if you want one". So Gmail says the Drafts folder does not exist, and Gmail was right. Under that English name, on your account, it really did not exist.

This is also why reading kept working while saving never did. Reading happens in your inbox, which is called INBOX on every account in every language. Saving a draft has to name a second folder, and that is the one Otto was getting wrong. Any non-English Gmail account hit this, no matter how carefully it was set up.

Stop chasing your connection. It was never the problem.

This is the part worth reading twice, because almost everyone spends days here first. The folder was on your account the whole time, sitting under its own local name. Nothing about your credentials or your connection was ever broken, so none of the following can help:

Do not create a new Google app password. The one you have already passed a real login test.
Do not remove and re-add the email account. You will re-add an account that was already correct.
Do not relink anything on claude.ai. The direct app-password connection does not use those connectors at all.
Do not go hunting through Gmail's label settings for a hidden Drafts label. Otto himself suggested this in some of these conversations. That suggestion was wrong, and it is a dead end. There is no hidden label to unhide.

One performer worked through two weeks, several app updates and two support bundles on this before we traced it. You do not have to repeat that.

The fix: update to 1.11.32 or newer

From version 1.11.32, Otto no longer assumes the English name. He asks your mail server to list its folders and takes the one the server itself flags as the drafts mailbox, which is a language-independent marker. Concepten, Entwürfe, Brouillons, Borradores, whatever your account calls it: he finds the real one.

Click Check for updates in the top bar, next to the logo, and let the update install. You will land on 1.11.32 or newer.
Open the Settings tab, stay on General, and look at the Updates card. It reads "You're running Booked Solid ..." with your version number. Confirm it says 1.11.32 or higher before you go on.
Click Start fresh to open a clean conversation. Otto loads your connections at the moment a conversation starts, so begin a new one rather than carrying on in the chat that was failing.
Ask Otto exactly this: "draft a quick test email to me, use the direct app-password Gmail connection."

The draft then saves straight into your real Drafts folder, under its own name, and Otto tells you which inbox and which subject he used.

If the inbox is not a Gmail account

The same bug existed one layer further out for inboxes on other hosts: a custom domain, iCloud, or any other IMAP provider added under More > Connections > Mail & calendars. On those accounts the app used to pin the drafts folder to the English Drafts before Otto ever asked the server, so a German account on a hosted domain failed in exactly the same way. That was fixed in 1.11.33, together with a quieter version of the same problem where the app looked for a Sent folder by five English names and simply never found it on a non-English account. If your failing inbox is not Gmail, make sure you are on 1.11.33 or newer rather than 1.11.32.

How to confirm it worked

The real test is the task that kept failing, so run that one and not something easier. Ask for the test draft, then open Gmail yourself and look in your drafts folder under its local name. A draft sitting there is the successful result.

One thing that surprises people: Otto never sends. He writes the email into your drafts and you press send. So a draft appearing quietly, with no confirmation of a sent message, is success, not a half-finished job. The performer who reported this confirmed his test draft landing in his Concepten folder on 2 August 2026, on the fixed build.

If you need Otto to use one specific folder

There is a per-account override that pins an inbox to a named drafts mailbox, for the rare setup where automatic discovery is not what you want. It is not something to guess at, because an override switches the automatic lookup off and can recreate the exact failure this article describes. If you think you need it, open a ticket and tell us the account and the folder, and we will set it with you.

If it still does not work

If you are on 1.11.32 or newer, you have used Start fresh, and the draft still will not save, the next useful thing is your app's own logs. Open Settings, stay on General, scroll down to the Support logging card and press Generate Support Bundle, ideally right after a fresh chat where the draft failed, so the failure is in the logs. Switching Support logging on before you reproduce it gives us more detail. The bundle collects app errors, system details, safe settings and counts. It does not include your messages, your client details, your passwords or your saved keys.

Email that file to bookedsolid@kivimedia.freshdesk.com with the exact wording of the error, in whatever language Otto gave it to you. The original wording matters here more than usual, because the language of the message is a real clue about which folder was missed. That Dutch transcript is precisely what let us find this one.

Thanks to Glenn, who stayed with this for two weeks and sent the transcripts that pinned it down for every non-English inbox.