News for Email allows authors to convert their SharePoint News posts into distributions that can be read fully in email inboxes. You can now engage your audience directly in their inbox and track their mail reads.  

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How to Create News for email 

  1. To create distributions that are made for email, start from the + menu drop down and select News post.

    Note: Currently, you can't create made for email distributions for other page types or promoted news. 

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  2. Select one of our Made for email template options.   SharePoint news screenshot three.png

  3. In the newly created post, you can start authoring your page.

    Notes: 

    • You’ll notice a few key changes from the previous experience, namely: 

    • Post and send replaces post to now include email distribution into your publishing flow.

    • Made-for-email webparts are only in your webpart picker.  

  4. After writing your post, select Post and send to publish your news to your site.

    Note: Made for email webparts include, but aren't limited to, text, image, and people.

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Your post will be confirmed in the following dialog box: 

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You can preview your full distribution before you distribute it. Send your news straight to any email address by inputting recipients in the to line. This includes sending to, (and CCing,) distribution lists. 

Your post title is automatically auto-filled as your email subject line. If needed, you can manually change it by editing the dialogue box under CC. You can also add an optional message to appear as the body of your finished email.  

If instead, sending the full version, you can optionally send in a way that doesn’t show the full post content or grant new permissions. Toggle the send as link button next to send to revert to the legacy experience available for pages that are not made for email. With this option you can send a link to distribution lists without showing any of the mail content, and no analytics will be recorded.  

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Permissioning, Site Access, and Sharing 

When you send a News post as an email, all recipients can read the content of the post in its entirety but are not granted any further site permissions. This restriction includes access to the original page on SharePoint Online. You can think of sending mail by email as making someone a photocopy of a page in a book which they can read without being able to see anything else in the book.  

Existing site permissions are not impacted for users who already have site access, they will be able to view the Web version on SharePoint.  

Analytics 

When you create a Made for Email News Post, your email views, viewers, and page traffic will be added to your page analytics. However, your average time spent per user will only reflect your SharePoint Online views. User activity reflected in the report will not include usage data collected in the last 60 minutes. 

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Additional user activities such as reactions are not counted in page analytics, and any likes and comments are result of interaction with the SPO page.  

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An email view is counted after a user opens the email distribution, but not counted on forward, reply, or attachment. An email view is recorded regardless of where the mail is opened, whether the email client is Outlook, Outlook online, or a third-party provider such as Gmail. 

To be able to collect analytics, be sure to send your distribution to each recipient directly from the SharePoint page, either on first Post or later from the share dropdown.  

What your recipients will see 

News posts sent as emails can be viewed in any email client, and will display as any other email, sent from the News post author.  

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There may be a slight variation in the look of the end newsletter depending on the recipient's mail client. These variations are purely cosmetic, resulting from differences in how different mail clients process data. The best results will come from opening these distributions on Outlook.com.  

When viewing on a mobile device, recipients will see a distribution width of 600 pixels. However, when they view on a device with more available horizontal space (desktop mail app), these distributions will stretch to fill 740 pixels for better legibility and image quality. 

Updating your Post and sending again 

Updates to News posts sent as emails work the same way as updates to any other News post. Previous recipients and readers are not notified of changes to the document. Also note the version that you previously published is a static snapshot of the page at the moment of sending, and will not update in inboxes when your make updates to the online version, regardless of whether the mail has been opened or not.  If you want your readers to see your most recent changes, you can resend your page after the changes are made.  

To send your post as an email after initial publishing, use the send as email dialogue box again under the share dropdown.  

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Saving a Made for email news post as a custom template

If you save a made for email template as a custom template, it will show up on your site next to your standard templates. News that was created with this template will retain send-as-email capabilities and webpart scoping. 

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You can tell which of your saved templates can be sent as emails by noting the mail icon next to your template title (appearing the preview loads).  

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Making the "Saved on this site" tab open by default in the Template Picker

If you set a custom "saved on this site" template as your default template on a given site, the "saved on this site" tab will now open by default whenever anyone creates a new News Post. The "From Microsoft" made for email templates can still be accessed by clicking the "from Microsoft" tab. 

photo of saved on this site tab dropdown menu on news template picker

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