How to Create an Email Template in Outlook (New & Classic)

Which Outlook template feature you have

Mail Templates arrived in the new Outlook and Outlook on the web in late 2025 and do what classic .oft files always did: store a whole message. Mail Templates are shared between the new and classic Outlook, so one saved in either shows up in the other for the same Microsoft 365 mailbox. Menu paths below were checked against Microsoft Support in November 2026.

How to add an email template in the new Outlook and on the web

1. On the Home ribbon, choose New > Mail and write the message: recipients, subject, body, attachments.
2. On the Message ribbon, choose Mail template > Save email as template. In the simplified ribbon it sits under the three-dot menu.
3. Give it a name and select Save.

To use it, choose New > Mail from template on the Home ribbon and pick it. It opens as a draft; what you change there is not saved back to the template. To edit, rename or delete a template, go to Settings > Mail > Templates.

How to create an email template in classic Outlook

1. Select New Email (Ctrl+Shift+M) and write the message.
2. Choose File > Save As, set Save as type to Outlook Template, name it and save. It lands in AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Templates.

To use it, select New Items > More Items > Choose Form, set Look In to User Templates in File System, pick the template and select Open. Classic Outlook with a Microsoft 365 mailbox also has the Mail template button, which works as above.

My Templates: short text you reuse

My Templates is an add-in for snippets: a paragraph you paste into many replies, not a whole email. On the Message tab choose My Templates (classic Outlook calls it View Templates), then +Template, a title and the text. Click a snippet in the pane to drop it into the message. If the button is missing, your organisation may have turned add-ins off.

Share a template with your team

Open the template with Mail from template, then choose Mail template > Forward as OFT and send it. The recipient adds it under Settings > Mail > Templates > Add OFT. Copies don't stay in sync, so for a template everyone edits, save it in a shared mailbox that each person has added as a full account.

Using an HTML email template in Outlook

Getting coded HTML into an Outlook message is covered in how to send an HTML email from Outlook: Insert as Text in classic Outlook, paste from a browser in the new one. The question here is what Outlook keeps when you then save that message as a template.

We measured it. By script, we set the MJML welcome email from our template library as a message body in classic Outlook 16.0 for Windows (one template, on 2026-11-12), opened it in the compose window, saved it as a template, reopened it and compared the HTML:

The compose window is Word, and Word rewrote the email as a Word document: the mobile layout, the fixes aimed at Outlook itself, the web font and the accessibility roles were gone, and the HTML grew from 11 KB to 45 KB. Without its @media rules the email has no mobile layout left, and at 45 KB it is closer to Gmail's 102 KB clipping limit.

Saved by script without opening the compose window, the same HTML came back intact apart from its charset meta tag. In our run, Outlook itself changed almost nothing; the Word editor rewrote the markup. So keep the source of an HTML email in your own editor or email framework, and treat an Outlook template as a way to resend a finished message from Outlook, not as where the design lives. To see what Outlook does to the CSS you send, start with the Outlook CSS guide.