How to avoid draft emails from disappearing while switching between apps?

I have this exact problem.

I start writing a reply email, switch to another app to get something (link, words, picture, etc.), copy, and come back to mail to see my writing has disappeared! It's never been a lot of writing, thankfully, but it's annoying every time. What the **** is going on?

This behavior could certainly occur in iOS 6.

However, there could be a bug or change in the latest level of Safari/iOS which is requiring more memory to be used and making the problem more likely to occur.

If you think that such is happening let Apple know via a bug report at http://www.apple.com/feedback/ipad.html Provide some detail on what you were doing, i.e. pages visited, actions taken, etc.

This can happen when the operating system needs to allocate memory for the app you are switching to. Any dormant apps memory may be used. If this occurs then your draft is lost.

To prevent this from happening cancel your draft before switching apps. You will be given the option to save the draft. Do so and you can always recover the draft to edit before sending it.

Note that this is more likely to happen on iPads with less RAM, I.e., the iPad 1 256 MB and iPad 2 512 MB.

Follow up: I did a hard reset of the iPad and it seems to have solved the problem. I hope appearances aren't deceiving. I'm wondering if this may be something that happens to some first email, but stops there. And the next day's first email will similarly disappear, leaving the later ones safe?

Thanks for the reply. I'm using a 3rd generation iPad, and I never saw this behavior in iOS 6 to my recollection. Is iOS 7 worse at handling memory or is there something that may be hogging it? One would think that written text in an email would have higher priority than a static web page (of which I only had two at the time, and they refreshed anyway), or a position in an old iMessage conversation.

Greetings

I Have had this problem for years. This morning I discovered that it went away when my message was not in my signature. I have used the greeting "Greetings" for over a decade and put it in my signature to keep from having to type it each time. It appears that iOS recreates the signature upon returning to the app deleting any modifications. The body of my message was sandwiched in the signature.

Hope this help.

Resetting the iPad frees all the RAM in use which makes this problem less likely to occur. It can still happen during subsequent use however.

Well, I'll keep an eye out then. Hopefully dev priorities will change towards favoring user input for memory. Or they'll stop being stingy with memory in devices.

I'll try to do the feedback report tonight.