How to Set Up a Newsletter in Outlook (and When to Stop Using It)

The short version: you can build and send a newsletter from Outlook using a Contact Group, a formatted HTML email or an imported Word document, and I'll walk you through every step below. What nobody tells you is that Outlook was built for one-to-one correspondence, not bulk email, so you'll hit sending limits, spam filters and legal problems with unsubscribing once your list passes about 150 to 200 people.

What "setting up a newsletter in Outlook" means

There's no newsletter button in Outlook. Microsoft Publisher used to have newsletter templates, but Publisher was retired in 2021 and folded into the wider Office deprecation. So when people say they want to "set up a newsletter in Outlook," what they really mean is one of three things: sending a formatted email to a group of contacts, building a reusable template so they don't start from scratch every month, or importing a designed document (Word, Canva export, whatever) into the body of an email. I'll cover all three, because I've built newsletters this exact way for small clients who weren't ready to pay for Mailchimp or Klaviyo.

Step by step: building the newsletter itself

This works in the classic Outlook desktop app (Windows), which is still what most small businesses run. The new Outlook and Outlook.com web version have fewer formatting options, so I'll flag where that matters.

• 1. Open a new email. Home tab, New Email.
• 2. Switch on formatting tools. Go to the Format Text tab. You'll get fonts, colours, tables and the ability to insert images, which is enough for a decent-looking newsletter.
• 3. Use a theme (classic Outlook only). File > Options > Mail > Stationery and Fonts lets you pick a background theme so every newsletter looks consistent instead of like a stray Word document. This option has disappeared from the new Outlook, so if you've upgraded, skip to step 4.
• 4. Build in Word, then paste. Honestly this gets better results. Design your layout in Word with headings, a two-column table for image plus text, and your logo top left. Copy the whole thing and paste into the Outlook email body with "Keep Source Formatting." This is how most of the Outlook-built newsletters I've seen get made, whatever Microsoft's own help pages suggest.
• 5. Insert images. Insert > Pictures, then resize by dragging the corner handle, never the side handles, or your photo will stretch. Keep images under 1MB each or your email will load slowly and some inboxes will clip it.
• 6. Add a clear subject line. Not "Newsletter." Something like "3 things to fix before Q1 (5 min read)." If you want a deeper steer on this, I've written separately about how to write newsletter emails that get opened, and the same rules apply whether you're sending from Outlook or a dedicated platform.
• 7. Save it as a template so you're not rebuilding every time. File > Save As, then choose Outlook Template (.oft) from the file type dropdown. Next month, open that file, update the content, and send. This alone saves most people an hour a month.
• 8. Send a test to yourself first. Every time. Check it on your phone too, because Outlook's mobile rendering is not the same as desktop, and a two-column layout that looks fine on your laptop can collapse into a mess on an iPhone.

Building your list: Contact Groups vs BCC

You've got two options and one of them is a genuine mistake.

The first is putting every subscriber's address in the To or CC field. Don't do this. It exposes every single person's email address to every other person on the list, which is a data protection issue in the UK under GDPR, not just bad manners. I've seen this go wrong: a personal training studio owner I worked with in Guildford sent her monthly class newsletter to 40 clients this way for over a year before a client complained that her email address had ended up forwarded to someone she didn't know. It was a fair complaint.

The second option, and the right one, is a Contact Group (previously called a Distribution List). Go to the People icon at the bottom left, click New Contact Group, name it something like "Newsletter List," then click Add Members and pull from your address book or type addresses directly. When you send your newsletter, put the Contact Group name in the BCC field, not To or CC. That way recipients only see their own address, and yours, in the header.

The sending limits nobody puts in these guides

Here's the bit most "how to set up a newsletter in Outlook" articles skip entirely, because it makes Outlook look bad, and it does.

A free Outlook.com or Hotmail account is capped at around 300 recipients per rolling 24-hour period, with a limit of 100 recipients on any single message. A Microsoft 365 Business account through Exchange Online typically allows up to 10,000 recipients per day, but caps each individual message at 500 recipients (To, CC and BCC combined). Go over that, even by accident, and Microsoft won't just reject the extra names, it can throttle your account for 24 to 48 hours, which means your normal client emails stop sending too. These figures shift as Microsoft updates its policies, so if you're planning to send to more than a couple of hundred people, check your current plan's limits in the Microsoft 365 admin centre before you press send, not after.

There's also no delivery reporting. Outlook won't tell you which of your 200 BCC recipients bounced, which opened it, or which unsubscribed, because there's no unsubscribe mechanism at all unless you type "reply STOP to unsubscribe" into the footer yourself and then manually remove that person from your Contact Group. Under UK PECR rules, marketing emails need a working way to opt out. A typed sentence technically satisfies the letter of it, but it puts the entire burden of compliance on you remembering to update a list by hand, which is exactly the kind of thing that slips when you're busy running a business.

Why this breaks past 150 to 200 subscribers

I've watched this pattern play out with three different small business owners now, and it's always the same shape. Under 100 subscribers, Outlook works fine. Between 100 and 200, delivery starts getting patchy, some subscribers stop receiving the newsletter at all and don't notice for months, and this connects to a wider problem I've written about separately, why email addresses disappear from Outlook and how to fix it, which is worth reading if contacts keep vanishing from your Contact Group without explanation.

Past 200, you're sending from a personal or small business domain that has no sender reputation with the mailbox providers on the other end (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook.com itself), and bulk sends from a domain with no authentication history get treated with suspicion. This is precisely why so many Outlook-built newsletters end up in spam, and I've covered the technical fixes for that in more detail in why your newsletter keeps landing in spam and how to fix it. The uncomfortable truth is that no amount of clever formatting fixes a deliverability problem, because it isn't a formatting problem. It's an infrastructure one, and Outlook simply wasn't built to solve it.

When to move off Outlook entirely

My honest rule of thumb: once you're past 150 subscribers, sending more than once a month, or you care about open rates, move to a dedicated platform. Mailchimp's free tier covers up to 500 contacts. MailerLite's free plan covers 1,000. Both handle unsubscribes automatically, authenticate your domain so you land in the inbox rather than spam, and show you exactly who opened what. The switch takes an afternoon, not a week, and I've never had a client regret it once they saw actual open rate data for the first time instead of guessing.

If you do stick with Outlook a while longer because your list is small, at least get the basics right: a consistent subject line format, a template you reuse, a BCC habit you never break, and a sending cadence you can keep. On that last point, I'd rather someone send a scrappy Outlook newsletter every two weeks without fail than an occasional beautifully designed one that shows up four times a year. I've written more on pacing in how often you should send marketing emails in 2026, and consistency beats polish every single time in this game.

One small formatting note while you're building it: if you're naming your newsletter something like "The Friday Five" or "Marketing Notes," there's an actual style convention for whether that goes in italics, quote marks, or plain text, which I've broken down in a quick style guide on italicising newsletter titles. Small thing, but it's the kind of detail that makes a newsletter look considered rather than knocked together in ten minutes.

Related: news (this site).

Frequently asked questions

Can you send a newsletter to hundreds of people from Outlook?

Technically yes up to your account's daily and per-message limits, which for Microsoft 365 Business accounts is typically 500 recipients per message and 10,000 per day, but deliverability drops sharply past a couple hundred subscribers because Outlook has no dedicated sending infrastructure or domain authentication for bulk email the way proper newsletter platforms do.

Does Outlook have a built-in newsletter template?

Not anymore. Publisher had newsletter templates but was discontinued in 2021. In classic Outlook desktop you can still use stationery themes under File > Options > Mail, and most people get better results by designing in Word and pasting the finished layout into the email body.

Is it legal to send a newsletter from Outlook without an unsubscribe link?

No, not for marketing emails to UK or EU recipients. Under PECR and GDPR you need a clear way for people to opt out. Outlook doesn't generate one automatically, so you need to add unsubscribe instructions in the footer yourself and manually remove people from your Contact Group when they ask.

What's the safest way to send a bulk email in Outlook without exposing addresses?

Create a Contact Group under the People tab, add your subscribers to it, then put that group in the BCC field of your email rather than To or CC. This keeps every recipient's email address hidden from everyone else on the list.

Official documentation

• the UK Information Commissioner's guidance on direct marketing