Outlook gives you two built in ways to reuse email text, and neither one is good enough. Mail Templates can build a whole new message but cannot help with replies. My Templates saves reusable snippets but strips out all formatting, so no bold, no headings, no links, no images. If you send the same wording again and again, both tools will let you down. Here is exactly how each Outlook email reuse feature works, where it fails, and what Microsoft should fix.
Outlook offers two ways to save standard or boilerplate text that you can reuse for emails. We wanted to write about them but during our research we discovered that neither is very good, the British would say “Not Fit for Purpose”.
Broadly, Microsoft’s options for standard email text in Outlook new for Windows or Mac:
- Mail Templates – complete emails with To and Subject plus message.
- These can contain formatted text, links and images.
- But only for new messages, not replies.
- These were .OFT files in classic Outlook.
- My Templates – short blocks of text that can be pasted into an email
- Text only, no formatting nor links.
- Can be pasted into any draft message.
Are the two names confusing? Yes.
Microsoft quietly admits the naming is a mess but hasn’t done anything to fix a problem of their own making.
What’s worse, neither feature is a useful or practical solution for customers. Mail Templates is only for new messages while My Templates can only offer plain text.
All we can say is #Don’tBlameTheMessenger
We’ve come up with Save Reusable Email Snippets in Outlook: 5 Real Workarounds.
Major problems with Mail Templates
Mail Templates only works to make new messages and even then, only if you start from the right template. It only works for the narrow situation of sending a new email.
The feature doesn’t work for replying to messages.
Nor is it any use for text to include as part of a longer new email or reply, another more common ‘use case’ (to use a phrase developers will understand).
My Templates is worse
Quite aside from the foolishly similar names, the “My Templates” Outlook feature is even more useless.
With My Templates you can save snippets of text to be pasted into emails, including replies.
But these snippets are TEXT ONLY, no formatting is saved, not even web links, let alone headings, bold, italics or images.
It’s hard to believe that not even basic HTML formatting is accepted but that’s how Microsoft has chosen to shortchange their paying customers.
Check box marketing
This is a classic Microsoft “check box” marketing trick. Microsoft spends just enough time and money to add a basic feature. They do just enough so the company can add ‘tick a box’ on a feature list but not enough so the feature is truly useful for customers.
What should Microsoft do?
Microsoft could improve these features quite easily, it only requires some time and a little money.
- Rename “My Templates” to something clearer and more distinct from “Mail Templates”.
- “Mail Snippets” or just “Snippets” would be good.
- Update the “My Templates” to accept formatted text.
- Even just basic HTML (bold, italic etc.) plus web links.
Extending “My Templates” beyond just plain text would make a huge difference. It would turn a ‘check box’ feature into something paying customers can really use.
Since Microsoft is currently fixated on AI and Copilot, we’re not holding our breath. We’d love to be proved wrong.
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