I have some further information: on investigation, my draft messages still exist in an AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird/Profiles.../Drafts file, but the index file (*.msf) is missing. Clicking on Repair Folder has no effect. I cannot read the mail file because the message texts are encrypted.

When I am composing a message - if I let it auto-save to drafts, it does so, and I can open it from drafts; but if I close the composing window so that the message is announced as saved to draft, the message text disappears, essentially permanently.

Im wondering if this is actually an issue to do with message encryption?

I have this same problem but I am working on Mac OS X 10.14.6. I am using Thunderbird 68.6.0 (64-bit).

So it doesn't seem to be a platform bug. I will start composing a message and have to pause to look up some information to work into my message. When I return to Thunderbird, I see a popup that says the message was autosaved to my Draft folder. The open composition window has no message text in the body that I'd written--it is all gone.

When I open the Draft, the "message" saved is just the To: and Subject: headers. The body of the message is blank.

How do I retrieve all the work I'd written before it was autosaved? How do I stop Thunderbird from erasing the message body when a Draft is saved? Even previously saved drafts are now blank except for the header information.

How do we report this bug to the developers?

That sounds the same as my problem, @wonderinggal. Are you using encyption? I have EnigMail installed, and I tried clicking on the EnigMail tab and selecting "Setup wizard". I think that might have cleared the problem, as regards *new* drafts! I also tried going into my account settings and clicking on the Open PGP Security tab, and then clearing the checkbox "Encrypt draft messages on saving".

My problem is that I still cannot access the 30 or so drafts that were made *before* I did the above actions. I know they are there, because I can see the encrypted messages in AppData/Roaming/Thunderbird/Profiles.../Drafts but I do not know how to decrypt them.

If I receive another message inviting me to upgrade EnigMail, I think I will ignore it, as I believe it is the upgrade to EnigMail that might have been the cause of this problem

Hi. No I'm not using encryption. But I did look at the Thunderbird/Profiles...Draft and Draft.msf files for the account I was using.. The Draft file has readable text of the settings and just the header of the message. The .msf file has readable text of the settings but then it appears that the body of the message is in code, which I can't decipher.

When I go to my account to try to look at the draft, there is nothing showing in the draft folder--not even the subject line of the "saved" draft, which at least shows in the readable text of the Profile draft file.

Something seems to be cloaking the drafts.