Here’s a question from Kim:
Hello – i was just tasked at managing several teams with several dozens of members each. Sometimes i am in need of communicating with all these folks using Microsoft Outlook emails (not specifically with each channel individually). When looking into the Outlook global address list i couldn’t find any of my Team names. Does Teams channels have email addresses – or should i be using the Posts tab to use a chat conversation to message each channel separately.
Sending emails to Teams channel members
Please proceed as following to send out an email to your Channel team members:
Find you teams channel email address
- Open Microsoft Teams
- Navigate to the channel which members you are interested to contact by email.
- Right click the More Options button (labeled …) next to your Channel.
- Hit Get Email Address
- Hit the Copy button to copy the channel address into your clipboard.
Note: Hitting the advanced settings link in the dialog above allows to determine who can contact the channel members by email. If you are receiving a permission error when contacting the channel by email, this would be your first place to look into.
Tip: As you might need to hit several channels with email communication in one go, it might be a good idea to paste the channels email addresses as Microsoft Outlook contacts or even more useful, an entire Outlook distribution list.
Use Outlook to email your Channels
- Now the easy part. Open Microsoft Outlook 365.
- From the Ribbon, hit the New Email button.
- Paste your channel mail address into the To field. If you saved the addresses as Outlook contact, you can easily select it from your Outlook Address book.
- Write your email and send it to your team members.
Send emails to meeting attendees
You can send emails to meeting attendees right on from Outlook:
- Open Outlook Calendar View.
- Locate the meeting in your Calendar and double click it.
- If the meeting was organized by you, you’ll notice the Contact Attendees button that allows to send a note to all invited people.
- If you attended the meeting as a participant, you can use the Respond button to send everyone an email.
Can i create a Teams distribution list in Outlook?
As mentioned before, you can easily a distribution list populated by the email addresses of your different channels.
I don’t have permission to email the channel, why?
If emailing your channel is not working for you, most probably that the reason is that one of the Team owners has authorized only Team members or internal users to interact with the channel by email. Contacting the Team owner would be then the first step in troubleshooting any possible email sending permission issue.
If that doesn’t help, you might need to contact your Teams administrator (most probably from IT). There is a little know Teams administrative setting that allows to define whether users are able to use the channel email address.
It is located under Teams || Team Settings || Email Integration:
Can i auto-forward emails to channel members?
Yes, once you have captured the channel address you can easily set up an Outlook rule that will auto forward any incoming mail message as needed.