Forum Discussion
Can SharePoint 365 News posts be emailed to external users?
I'm excited to see this new feature that lets us easily send SPO new posts via email! I'm noticing that when I type in an external email address, whether they are a guest in AAD or not, I'm not able ...
- Here is a way you can get that outcome that I just tested and does work: Create a Microsoft 365 Group (one that allows guests) and adding your volunteers as members of that group by their email address. Creating a Group gives you a SharePoint site and you can create news from that site and send it via email to all the members - whether they are internal or external. They will also have access to all of the other content on the site as members of that Group. But, if you wanted to share news that is hosted on another site, like your intranet home page, that site does not actually have to have external sharing enabled - and it probably shouldn't. What you would do is use Promote on an individual article to send it to the group via email. If the article is coming from a site that the users have not been added to (as Visitors or Members - which WOULD require external sharing to be enabled if it is a communication site), they will see the email but not be able to click on any links that point to the source site - because they don't have access to the source site. If you use a "made for email" news template to create the post, they will get the full content of the page, not just a summary. There will be a link at the bottom of the page that says View in SharePoint - but this won't work for them because they are not guests on the source site. I think this approach will get you your outcome (with an initial set-up step). Just one thing - when you create the group, everyone you invite will get an email inviting them to the group. If you don't want that to happen, I think there is a PowerShell script you can run to prevent it. So, to sum up, there is not a direct way to send an email of a SharePoint page outside the company, but if you have created a group and added them as a guest member, you can send to the group and they will get the email in their "home" email account.
Susan_Hanley Thanks for the reply! That's a bummer, as we'd like to automate sending news posts to target audiences (e.g., so only certain AAD guests get certain content based on their security group membership). I wonder why Microsoft doesn't all their clients to decide whether they send news to internal or external users... Much appreciated.
If these users have guest accounts in your tenant, then as some of the other approaches suggest, and your sharing settings are set accordingly, you might be able to get this outcome. However, you need to be sure that you want external sharing available on the site from which you send the post. Communication sites have external sharing disabled by default - you can turn it on in the Admin Center, however. You could try setting up a site specifically for external news and nothing else - and enable external sharing from that site. In this case, it might work. But you want to be careful about permissions. When you enable sharing on a site, you are technically enabling sharing for all of the content, not just news.
- Thank you for taking the time to reply, Susan! I created a test SPO Communication site and gave it Anyone external access. Unfortunately when I create a new News Post and type in a test Gmail email address, it won't accept it. Of course it will accept any AAD member email address, but not an external one. Sending News posts to our external volunteers is a critical part of our communication plan. Perhaps I'll open an MS Support case for assistance, unless you have any other ideas.
- Here is a way you can get that outcome that I just tested and does work: Create a Microsoft 365 Group (one that allows guests) and adding your volunteers as members of that group by their email address. Creating a Group gives you a SharePoint site and you can create news from that site and send it via email to all the members - whether they are internal or external. They will also have access to all of the other content on the site as members of that Group. But, if you wanted to share news that is hosted on another site, like your intranet home page, that site does not actually have to have external sharing enabled - and it probably shouldn't. What you would do is use Promote on an individual article to send it to the group via email. If the article is coming from a site that the users have not been added to (as Visitors or Members - which WOULD require external sharing to be enabled if it is a communication site), they will see the email but not be able to click on any links that point to the source site - because they don't have access to the source site. If you use a "made for email" news template to create the post, they will get the full content of the page, not just a summary. There will be a link at the bottom of the page that says View in SharePoint - but this won't work for them because they are not guests on the source site. I think this approach will get you your outcome (with an initial set-up step). Just one thing - when you create the group, everyone you invite will get an email inviting them to the group. If you don't want that to happen, I think there is a PowerShell script you can run to prevent it. So, to sum up, there is not a direct way to send an email of a SharePoint page outside the company, but if you have created a group and added them as a guest member, you can send to the group and they will get the email in their "home" email account.
- This worked! Thank you for your engagement in this, Susan; I'm sure this post will help others as well. To summarize, I created a new test SharePoint 365 site with external sharing, created an M365 Group and added external users to it via their email address (AAD Groups don't work, it must be an M365 group, I think), I then used the News Posts to Email feature of the SPO site and the external users received the post as expected.
