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Vallatt's avatar
Vallatt
Copper Contributor
Oct 26, 2022

Opening .msg files from sharepoint natively in Outlook

Hi   I am wondering if there is a method of opening .msg files in a similar manner to .xls and .docx, where you can open them natively. The current way sharepoint opens .msg files does not allow ac...
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Christina_Coleman2023's avatar
Christina_Coleman2023
Copper Contributor
Dec 27, 2023
MSFT, PLEASE, this is absolutely necessary. Email messages stored in SharePoint should open natively in Outlook same as Word and Excel do. The classic SP did, why did this get dropped with SharePoint online? Big mistake and a huge disservice to your customers. We should not have to add a third party tool for this considering we are a 365 environment now and these are both MSFT programs.
Paul de Jong's avatar
Paul de Jong
Iron Contributor
Dec 28, 2023

Christina_Coleman2023 

This functionality is not on the roadmap and is only modestly popular on the SharePoint feedback portal (link).

Automatically opening emails in SharePoint using Outlook can be implemented by using policies for Chrome/Edge without using 3rd party apps.

In short, you configure Chrome/Edge to allow direct opening when an email originates from your trusted SharePoint tenant (and not from other URLs) and you will also have to expose the download URL for the email (e.g. via json formatting) to simplify life for your users.

Note: this will only work on clients using Chrome or Edge where the policies have been configured. If you also have clients outside your control or use other browsers (Safari, FireFox, ...) this will not work.
This may be further complicated if you have a large number of sites in your tenant.

The above steps offer a workaround with limitations. You will miss out on some of the benefits of 3rd party apps like fast viewing of emails in the browser, viewing email attachments (docx, pdf, jpg, ...) in the browser, ...

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