Outlook Newsletters App for Outlook and OWA

Message center notifications MC1009916 (19 February 2025, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 328282) describes the new Outlook Newsletters solution, designed to create and send high-quality internal newsletters. The app is rolling out now in preview to targeted tenants. Standard tenants are likely to see Outlook Newsletters before the end of March 2025. General availability is scheduled for August 2025.

Outlook Newsletters is an app constructed from components drawn from the Microsoft 365 software toolbox like SharePoint Embedded, Microsoft Designer, Outlook reactions, comments, and so on. It’s a good example of how to combine available components with new code to create new apps.

Enabling Outlook Newsletters

Outlook Newsletters is an opt-in solution, meaning that it must be enabled before it appears in the menu bar for the new Outlook for Windows or OWA. Enablement is through settings in the OWA mailbox policies applied to mailboxes. Three policy settings are available (the administrator documentation is sparse and likely to be overhauled before general release):

• OutlookNewslettersAccessLevel: defines the access level a mailbox has to Outlook Newsletters. To create and send newsletters, this setting must be ReadWrite. Users with ReadOnly access can open the Newsletters app but can’t create or send newsletters. The default is no value, which equates to NoAccess.
• OutlookNewslettersReactions: Set to DefaultOn to make it the default that newsletters allow recipients to react in the same way as they react to normal Outlook email. Reactions can only be posted by internal recipients.
• OutlookNewslettersShowMore: Set to DefaultOn to make it the default for newsletters to display other newsletters at the bottom of a message. The idea is that recipients might find newsletters to subscribe to.

For example, this command allows any mailbox with the scope of the OWAFullAccess policy to have read write access to the Newsletters app with the other features enabled by default.

Set-OwaMailboxPolicy -Identity OWAFullAccess -OutlookNewslettersReactions DefaultOn -OutlookNewslettersAccessLevel ReadWrite -OutlookNewslettersShowMore DefaultOn

After updating the mailbox policy, it will take between 15 and 30 minutes before the Newsletters app becomes available to users in the Outlook menu bar. Alternatively, users can open the app using the direct link.

Quick Tour of Outlook Newsletters

The user documentation for Outlook Newsletters is available online and doesn’t need to be repeated here. Instead, I’ll describe how I created and sent a newsletter in just a few minutes.

After opening the app, you can choose to create a newsletter or group page. A group page is recommended when a newsletter has multiple contributors and multiple newsletters will be created with common branding, so that’s what I created (Figure 1). I added a heading and some common settings shared by all the newsletters associated with the group page.

Next, create a newsletter by selecting one of the out-of-the-box templates or a blank template. I used the basic template, which seemed like a good starting point to create a newsletter to circulate details of blog posts published over the last month.

Creating the content of a newsletter is a matter of editing the elements contained in sections. A template contains prepopulated sections to make the task easier, but you can add or remove elements as you like to create the desired effect. In my case, I extracted snippets and links for blog posts and combined them with images to highlight each article. Suitable images can be uploaded or generated using Microsoft Designer.

Draft newsletters and comments are stored in SharePoint Embedded containers and are visible through the SharePoint admin center (Figure 3) and PowerShell. Unhappily, an application name isn’t registered for the containers used by Outlook Newsletters. No doubt this is a detail that Microsoft will clean up before GA.

When the newsletter is complete, it’s ready for sending. This process involves creating a HTML format body part and combining it with message properties like the message title and recipients (Figure 4) before sending the message from the author’s mailbox, much like you’d do with Graph APIs.

Only known recipients can receive newsletters. A known recipient is an emailable object known to Exchange Online, including distribution lists, Microsoft 365 groups, individual mailboxes, mail user objects for guest accounts, and mail contacts.

You can enter an SMTP address, but Outlook drops these addresses if they don’t match with a known recipient when it sends the message. The golden rule is that to send a newsletter to an external address, the address must belong to a known recipient. This isn’t a big deal because it’s easy to create a mail contact for an external recipient, even for something like the email address for a team channel.

When sent, copies of the newsletter are normal messages in recipient mailboxes. After it is sent, the newsletter remains available for editing in the Newsletters app. If you make some changes and send another version, everyone in the recipient list receives a new copy.

Lots to Like

There’s lots to like about the Outlook newsletters app. The output generated looks well, basic analytics are included, newsletters support subscribe and unsubscribe options, messages can be sent from one mailbox with replies going back to a different mailbox, and so on. It’s definitely an app that people who send internal communications can find value.

Although it’s possible to send newsletters externally, restrictions like the new tenant-wide external recipient limit in Exchange Online constrain sending high volume communications, even if you add all the external email address as mail contacts. Used properly for internal communications, Outlook newsletters have the potential to be very successful.

So much change, all the time. It’s a challenge to stay abreast of all the updates Microsoft makes across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to receive monthly insights into what happens, why it happens, and what new features and capabilities mean for your tenant.