Forum Discussion
OWA Rich Link Preview: metadata returns HTTP 200 but preview card is never rendered
Yes, the Link Preview feature hasn't been working for quite some time now (multiple years in fact).
It's a legacy feature that is based on the Skype framework. You actually have the correct request URL highlighted in your screenshot which shows that too.
Expect this feature to be retired entirely soon. I don't know whether (eventually) they'll replace it with a modern version as it still works in Teams. Then again, it was never brought over to Classic Outlook either, even though it worked (and still works) in OneNote for specific URL sources like YouTube. 🤷
Thank you Robert, I really appreciate you taking the time to explain this.
What you are saying unfortunately fits almost perfectly with what I have been seeing technically, and it finally helps make sense of why I have been going in circles with this for so long.
The difficult part for me is that this genuinely matters to my business. I have spent months trying to get Rich Link Preview working because professional presentation in customer-facing email matters when you are competing for attention, trust and credibility.
At the moment I am effectively stuck with plain blue hyperlinks while businesses using other email platforms can communicate in a much more polished and professional way. That may sound like a small UI feature from the outside, but when email is an important part of how you compete for business, it really isn't.
What makes the situation particularly frustrating is that Microsoft's current public Support documentation still says Link Preview should work in Outlook on the web, while Exchange Online still exposes LinkPreviewEnabled = True.
So from an end-user perspective, everything still tells me this is functionality I should have.
There are three things I am really hoping you might be able to shed some light on:
- Has Microsoft ever published an official retirement or deprecation notice for Link Preview?
For example, a Message Center communication, roadmap item, support notice or product-group statement. - Has the Outlook rendering component effectively been disabled while the legacy urlp.asm.skype.com service remains active?
That would fit the evidence almost perfectly, because Outlook successfully receives the complete preview metadata but never requests the returned thumbnail or inserts the preview into the DOM. - Most importantly, is this now a global Outlook product state, or could there still be a tenant / feature-flight condition that Microsoft can change?
That last question matters enormously to me because I am still actively working with Microsoft Support to get the documented functionality restored on my tenant, and I really do not want to give up on it if there is still a technical path to getting it working.
Thank you again, Robert. After months of troubleshooting, repeated checks and very little clarity, having someone who actually understands the Outlook side of this takes the time to explain what may be happening is genuinely appreciated.