Mail's Send Later feature deletes unsent emails

I had a serious issue with Apple Mail's Send Later feature that caused data loss. I'm posting this in hopes that Apple engineers will see it, because this behaviour seems unintended, is extremely dangerous for users, and looks like amateur work to me!

What happened:

• I composed an email in Apple Mail (MacOS 26.1 (25B78)).
• I selected Send Later and scheduled it for a specified time.
• At the scheduled send time, the connectivity to my email server was temporarily unavailable.
• Instead of keeping the message in a local folder, Apple Mail deleted the entire email.
• The message was not in any folder: I even ran a "grep -ri 'ASCII word from my email' in ~/Library/Mail/ and there wasn't even any file created at that time.

The only reason I recovered the email was because I had a backup that happened to run just before the scheduled send time. Otherwise, the message (an hour of work) would have been permanently lost. Also, restoring the email from the file isn't accessible to anyone without any technical knowledge; I had to use the shell.

This is a critical flaw:

• Apple Mail does not save a scheduled email as a file until the exact moment it attempts to send it.
• Data should never be silently discarded.

Expected behaviour:

If Mail cannot send a scheduled message at the scheduled time, it should create a local Outbox folder on the Mac and copy it there.

Thank you.

PS: The automated signature below that message is not accurate; it's from 2 Macs ago.