Outlook – How to save a .html file as an email template file for MS Outlook

Although it's quite old topic it is still valid and I'd like to add step-by-step in Outlook 2016 (most likely works also in Outlook 2013). I struggled to get a proper guide and after multiple trial and error approaches from different sources, got it finally working.

There's couple of tools/solutions out there but they're paid and usually include plenty of unnecessary stuff while you only need to import HTML template and save it as OFT.

In Outlook 2016:

1. Click "New Email" (we will add it straight to the place where it should be :) )
2. Right-Click either on the Quick Access Toolbar in top-left corner or on a free, grey space of the ribbon and choose "Customize Quick Access Toolbar"
3. In the displayed two-pane window, start with left pane and from dropdown on top of the pane, change "Popular Commands" to "All Commands"
4. Scroll down left pane until you see two items "Attach File..." and "Attach File" - select second one without three dots/arrow
5. Between the panes, use "Add >>", to move it to Quick Access Toolbar (right pane) and click OK to close the window

Now every time you open new email, make sure that the "HTML" is set in Format Text tab - then in top left corner (Quick Access Toolbar), you will see the paperclip icon.

1. Click the icon
2. Navigate to your HTML template file and select it (single click)
3. Lookup the Insert button and click on small arrow on its right side
4. Click Insert as text
5. Template should load as an HTML (WYSIWYG version)
6. Save file as an Outlook template (OTF file)

Voila!

Worth considering: Outlook has it's own way of rendering HMTL (it uses MS Word for processing it) and is somehow limited with mix of old HTML and some CSS. I strongly advise to research Litmus articles as these guys have mastered the non-standardised yet, and literally a dark-art of HTML emails in the closest to bulletproof form. Even with current Gmail Client rendering improvements, I still keep inline CSS as a standard to make sure it looks as good in every client out there as possible. There's many tools that convert your HMTL code with styles to the CSS-inlined version so that should be no problem for you guys. Long time will pass before W3C makes standards for HTML emails so good luck until then - hope it helps.

"Can someone elaborate on what's going on here? How does Outlook determine that there are extra line breaks?"

By default, the Auto Remove Line Breaks feature in Outlook is enabled. This causes the line breaks to be removed. Any two or more successive line breaks are not removed.

Source: Line breaks are removed in posts made in plain text format in Outlook

I've run into this myself in the past as well. The "fix" I used was to change the source email (mine were generated by a utility I wrote) and indent each line with a couple spaces, and magically Outlook would stop trying to unwrap them.

According to this blog, and this thread you may also be able to prevent the unwrap by appending a single extra space on the END of each line as well/instead. :)