In the last 2 weeks, I’ve noticed on several occasions I’ve thought I’d sent mail only to find it sitting as a “Draft” in Gmail. I began to think there was a horrible bug in Gmail and was having flashbacks to the days of figuring out why Outlook would leave mail stuck in your outbox.

Today I figured it out. It’s the scrollbars.

When you start replying to the message, assuming you scroll down a little into the body (which I seem to do often on my laptop’s screen, but less often on a desktop screen) the “send” button scrolls off. But, it’s not obvious that you’ve lost the send button, because there is still a top row of buttons. I wind up, subconsciously, clicking the “back arrow” button as the closest thing to “send” or “reply.”

If the scrollbars were the traditional browser-standard ones, it would be obvious to me that I’m in a frame that had scrolled down. For example, it’s obvious inside the message pane itself. As it stands now, I don’t even notice that a row of buttons has scrolled off of the page, since only part of the page is scrolling, and it’s doing so very subtly.