Table of Contents
Getting Email into Teams
I must have been sleeping in January 2021 and failed to notice that Microsoft posted in User Voice (now discontinued) that Teams supports drag and drop from Outlook. Several sites picked up the news, but Microsoft didn’t post a message center notification to make the information more broadly available.
In any case, drag and drop capability joins the array of methods available to bring email into Teams:
- Share to Teams uses an Outlook add-in to send a message to a Teams channel or chat (including the ability to create a new chat). Because Teams cannot read encrypted messages, email protected with Office 365 Message Encryption, sensitivity labels, or S/MIME are not sharable. Share to Teams works with Outlook for Windows (Microsoft 365 apps for Enterprise), Outlook for Mac, and OWA. It isn’t available in Outlook mobile.
- Reply with IM is an Outlook desktop option available when Teams is the registered chat application for Windows. The option creates a chat with people addressed in the email.
- Reply to Teams Missed Activity Mail gives users who receive missed activity notifications the ability to respond to conversations in Teams using Outlook actionable messages.
- Email-enabled channels have special email addresses to allow the delivery of messages through a connector to become channel conversations. Organizations can restrict who can send email to an email-enabled channel.
- Drag and Drop from Outlook desktop allows users to drag and drop a message (and any attachments) to a Teams channel conversation.
Dragging a Message to Teams
Outlook for Windows supports drag and drop of a message and any attachments from any folder to a Teams channel conversation. You can’t drag and drop a message to a personal or group chat and the feature isn’t available in OWA or Outlook for Mac.
To get an email to Teams, select it in Outlook and drag it to the compose box for a new topic or reply and drop it there (Figure 1).
To get the message into Teams, Outlook uploads a copy of the message into the channel folder in the SharePoint site belonging to the target team and creates a link to the email in the Teams message. The user can then add extra context for the message, just like they would for any other attachment shared in a channel before posting (Figure 2). Users can also drag and drop messages from Outlook to the Files channel tab. This action uploads the message to SharePoint without creating a message in the channel.
Notice that the file stored by Teams in SharePoint Online is a .msg file (Figure 3). This file is a complete message, including attachments.
To view the message, users use the message viewer through the Teams Files channel tab or SharePoint Online to view the content of the .msg file. As you can see in Figure 4, the viewer shows no trace of any attachment.
To access message attachments, users must download a copy of the .msg file. Outlook desktop can then open the .msg file to expose the full structure of the message, including any attachments.
Protected Email Unsupported
Although Outlook can upload messages protected with sensitivity labels (or S/MIME or any other protection mechanism) to Teams, users won’t be able to read the content unless they download the message and open it with Outlook. When this happens, Outlook checks if the user has the necessary rights to view the content and if so, decrypts and displays the message.
Another way of handling protected email is to copy the decrypted text from Outlook and paste it into a Teams message. If you want to include the message header to show recipients, forward the message to someone (but don’t send it) and copy the text inserted into the forwarded copy. Any attachments (which will also be protected) must be downloaded and posted to Teams separately. I use this method frequently when I want to post something from email to Teams.
Delayed but Welcome
Drag and drop is such a natural part of working with data that it’s surprising Microsoft supported this method to link Outlook to Teams so late in the evolution of the client. Now that it’s here (and you know about it), try the feature out and see what you think about dragging messages from Outlook to Teams.
You should be able to drag attachments as well. It’s absurd to have to download and send separately.
Equally absurd? Dragging email (with or without attachments) to a Channel Post saves the msg and any attachments to the root level of Files. Same result when uploading files to a Post using the paperclip icon. Both create an unorganized mess of files at the root level. And if you then move the files, you then break the link to the Channel Post. Six years of using Teams and they still don’t provide a file dialogue for events like this!
When working on a project with others, it would be convenient to have a folder in teams where we can dump emails related to the project. The folder would show us columns for to, from, date, subject and the clip to indicate an attachment. What we have at the moment is a second best “create a folder under the “Files” section in a Channel, then drop the email in there. Technically functional, but ugly. If I need the email again, I’m still going back to Outlook for it.
Hi this feature only appears to be available in the Outlook client and not in OWA, is that correct? I really want to know how to save an attachment in an email (not the email) into Teams via OWA.
It’s just a desktop feature for now.
Doesn’t work for MacOS clients yet.