microsoft / microsoft/work-iq

ask_work_iq claims to create Outlook draft but no draft appears in mailbox

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Description

Summary

ask_work_iq reports it successfully created an Outlook draft email, but no draft appears in the Outlook Drafts folder (checked both web and desktop clients).

Environment

  • Product/Service: WorkIQ MCP (via Copilot CLI)
  • Client: GitHub Copilot CLI (terminal)
  • OS: Windows 11

Reproduction Steps

  1. Call ask_work_iq with a prompt requesting to create a draft email with specific recipients, subject, and body
  2. WorkIQ responds with a confirmation including checkmark emoji: "Draft email created and saved to your Outlook mailbox" with all recipients listed
  3. Open Outlook (web or desktop)
  4. Check Drafts folder

Expected Behavior

A draft email should appear in the Outlook Drafts folder with the specified recipients, subject, and body pre-filled.

Actual Behavior

  • WorkIQ responds with a confident success message: "✅ Draft email created and saved to your Outlook mailbox"
  • Lists all recipients as "verified in the directory"
  • Shows the full subject and body as confirmation
  • No draft appears in Outlook Drafts folder (checked both web and desktop)

Additional Verification

When asked "which Outlook account did you use?", WorkIQ responded that it cannot see the authenticated email address and doesn't know which account was used — raising the question of whether the draft creation actually happened at all.

When asked directly about its capabilities, WorkIQ confirmed it can "Draft emails (new messages, replies, forwards) that you can review and edit before sending." But the draft was never materialized.

Impact

Medium — The confident false-positive success message is the main concern. If WorkIQ cannot reliably create Outlook drafts, it should either:

  1. Actually create the draft via Microsoft Graph API
  2. Clearly state it can only compose text (not create Outlook draft objects) and stop claiming success
  3. Return the content as copyable text with instructions to paste into Outlook

The current behavior erodes trust because the user has no way to distinguish a real success from a hallucinated one.

Additional Context

  • All 4 recipients were valid Microsoft directory entries (WorkIQ confirmed lookup)
  • Checked multiple Outlook accounts — no draft in any of them
  • This may be a case where the LLM is generating a "success" response pattern without actually invoking a Graph API call to create the draft

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start at the ask_work_iq entry point used through the Copilot CLI and trace whether a Microsoft Graph draft-creation request is made after the success response. Check how the authenticated Outlook account and request result are handled. Done means a real draft appears in Outlook, or the response accurately reports that only text was composed.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
powershell
Domain
api, cli
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
45/100

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