How to Share Email Templates in Gmail, Outlook 365 & TextExpander

You can share email templates in Gmail and Outlook, but neither app is built for it. Gmail keeps templates in each person’s account, and Outlook’s native options mean passing files around or setting up a shared mailbox, so most teams end up relying on a workaround.

Workarounds hold up until the templates start changing. When everyone keeps their own copy, wording drifts, and older versions stay in use after the message behind them has changed. The best approach depends on how many templates your team maintains and how many apps they write in.

Can you share Gmail templates with your team?

No.

Gmail Templates (formerly called Canned Responses) are stored per individual Google account. There’s no Google Workspace admin setting, no sharing toggle, no way to push a template from one inbox to another. Every person on your team manages their own separate library.

This surprises a lot of teams who assume Workspace includes shared template management. It doesn’t. What Workspace gives you is admin control over installed apps and some data governance, not shared email templates.

What you can do is work around it. Two approaches hold up in practice.

How to share email templates in Gmail

Option 1: Shared Google Keep notes

Google Keep supports collaborative notes. It’s not purpose-built for this, but it works for small teams with a short list of templates.

1. Open Google Keep and create a note for each template (or one note per category with templates organized under headings)
2. Click the person icon at the bottom of the note
3. Enter teammates’ Google account email addresses
4. They’ll see the note appear in their own Google Keep and can open it alongside Gmail

The friction point: team members have to open Keep, find the template, copy the text, and paste it into Gmail. Every single time. For five or six templates it’s fine. For thirty, it becomes a liability.

Option 2: Shared Google Doc template library

For larger template libraries, a shared Google Doc holds up better and is easier to maintain.

1. Create a new Google Doc and name it something specific, like “Team Email Templates: Sales Q2”
2. Organize templates with clear headings by function or department
3. Click Share, then set permissions to Viewer (read-only) or Editor (team can update templates)
4. Share the link via Slack, your internal wiki, or email
5. Team members keep the Doc open in a tab while composing emails

The limitation is the same as Keep: there’s no in-context insertion. Copy-paste is the whole workflow. That adds enough friction that people stop using it, especially under pressure.

How to share email templates in Microsoft Outlook

Outlook is closer. You can store templates as files and put those files somewhere the team can reach. It’s still a workaround, but a functional one.

Method 1: .oft files on a shared drive

Outlook saves templates in the .oft format, which is just a file you can store anywhere.

1. Compose a new email in Outlook with your full template content: subject line, body, and any standard formatting
2. Click File > Save As
3. In the “Save as type” dropdown, choose Outlook Template (*.oft)
4. Name the file clearly (for example, “Support: Refund Response”) and save it to a shared OneDrive or SharePoint folder the whole team can access
5. To use it: team members open the shared folder, double-click the .oft file, and Outlook opens it as a pre-filled draft ready to send

This works reliably. The downside is version control. When you update a template, you replace the file and have to notify everyone manually. Nothing happens automatically.

Method 2: Drafts in a shared mailbox (Outlook 365)

For teams on Microsoft 365, this scales better than the file method.

1. Ask your IT admin to create a shared mailbox in the Microsoft 365 admin center
2. Draft each template as an email and save it in the Drafts folder of that shared mailbox
3. Your IT admin grants team members access to the shared mailbox through Outlook settings
4. Team members open the shared mailbox in Outlook, open a draft template, copy the content into a new compose window, customize, and send from their own address

Updates are visible to everyone with mailbox access immediately. You edit one draft, the whole team sees the new version.

Note on the My Templates add-in: Outlook 365’s My Templates add-in saves snippets per user only, the same limitation as Gmail. It’s not a shared library. Don’t spend time trying to make it work for team sharing; it wasn’t built for that.

For step-by-step help building Outlook templates from scratch, see our guide on creating email templates in Outlook.

How to create a shared email template in Outlook 365

If you’re in a Microsoft 365 environment and want a team-accessible template system, the shared mailbox approach is the most practical native method. Here’s the process end to end:

1. Create a shared mailbox. In the Microsoft 365 admin center, go to Teams & groups > Shared mailboxes > Add a shared mailbox. Name it something your team will recognize, like “Team Templates.”
2. Add templates as drafts. Open the shared mailbox in Outlook. Compose each template email with subject and body, then save as a draft. Don’t send.
3. Grant team access. Back in the admin center, add the team members who need access to the shared mailbox.
4. Use the templates. Team members open the shared mailbox in Outlook (it appears in the left sidebar under their account), open the relevant draft, copy the body text, paste into a new compose window from their own address, and send.

It’s more setup than a .oft folder. But once it’s in place, anyone on the team can add new templates, updates are instant, and there’s no file distribution to manage.

How to send an Outlook template to another person

To send an Outlook template to another person, share it as an .oft file. In new Outlook for Windows and Outlook on the web, you can forward a draft as an .oft attachment or download a saved template as an .oft file, and the other person adds it to their own templates.

In new Outlook and Outlook on the web

1. Send a draft as a template. Open or create the draft, then select Forward as OFT on the Message tab. Outlook attaches the draft as an .oft file to a new draft. Add the recipient and send.
2. Send a saved template. Go to Settings > Mail > Templates, find the template, and select Save as OFT. Attach the file to an email, or save it to a shared OneDrive or SharePoint folder.
3. Add a template someone sent you. Go to Settings > Mail > Templates, select Add > Add OFT, select Choose, pick the .oft file, and select Add.

Microsoft notes that opening .oft files in new Outlook and Outlook on the web requires a qualifying Microsoft 365 subscription.

In classic Outlook

Save the message as an Outlook Template (*.oft) with File > Save As, as in Method 1 above, and attach the file to an email. The recipient opens the file to get a pre-filled draft.

What sending a copy doesn’t do

Every .oft file you send is a separate copy. When you change the original, the other person still has the old version until you send it again, which is the same version problem as the shared folder method. A shared Snippet Group avoids it: everyone works from one copy, and an edit reaches the whole team right away. See how TextExpander for Outlook works inside the inbox, and how TextExpander for teams handles a wider rollout. Sharing is included on the Free plan for up to five people.

Sharing templates in Mailchimp, HubSpot, and Salesforce

CRM and marketing platforms handle this better than email clients do. Sharing is part of the product design.

Mailchimp templates are available to all users in an account. You can also export templates as HTML to move them between platforms when needed.

HubSpot has a Templates tool in the Sales Hub where you can share templates with specific individuals, your whole team, or the full organization. Role-based access is built in.

Salesforce lets you set email templates as public (available to all users) or restrict them by folder and permission. Zendesk has similar organization-wide macro sharing for support teams.

The catch with all of these: templates live inside that platform. A template saved in HubSpot doesn’t follow your team into Gmail or any other app. If your team uses multiple tools, you end up maintaining separate template libraries in each one.

How to share email templates with your team using TextExpander

TextExpander solves the cross-platform problem. Snippets work in any app where you type: Gmail, Outlook, Chrome, Slack, web forms, anything. Share once, and the same templates are available everywhere.

Step 1: Create a Snippet Group

Sign in to TextExpander and create a new Snippet Group. Name it for what it contains: “Customer Support Templates,” “Sales Outreach,” or “HR Responses.” This is the container you’ll share with your team.

Step 2: Add your email templates as Snippets

Each Snippet is a template plus a short abbreviation. Type the abbreviation and TextExpander expands it to the full email, wherever your cursor is. For example:

• ;welcome expands to your new-customer welcome email
• ;followup expands to a post-call follow-up
• ;refund expands to your standard refund response

Use Fill-In fields to mark the parts that vary: recipient name, order number, date, account type. When someone triggers the Snippet, TextExpander prompts them to fill those fields before the text expands. No manual editing after insertion.

For ready-to-use starting points, the customer service email templates library has Snippets your support team can adopt immediately.

Step 3: Share the Group with your team

1. Open the Snippet Group settings in TextExpander
2. Click Share Group
3. Enter teammates’ email addresses
4. Assign permissions: View Only (they can use templates but not modify them) or Can Edit (they can add and update templates)
5. Teammates get an invitation email and accept it

The Group appears in their TextExpander app immediately. There’s no file to transfer, no version to track.

Step 4: Use templates from any app

Team members type the abbreviation wherever they’re working. TextExpander expands it in-context. The same ;followup Snippet works in Gmail, Outlook, LinkedIn, Salesforce, and anywhere else your team types.

When you update a Snippet in the Group, everyone with access sees the change instantly. No announcements required.

Team email template best practices

Getting templates into a shared system is the easier half. Keeping that system useful six months later is harder.

Assign ownership by category. Pick one person to own each template category. Sales owns sales outreach. Support owns support responses. Diffuse ownership is the same as no ownership: things get stale and nobody’s responsible for fixing them.

Review the library every quarter. Three months is about the right interval. Pull up the full list and ask: does this still reflect how we talk to customers? Are there templates nobody’s used in months? Cut the dead weight.

Name templates for their job, not their content. “Refund Response: Standard” is useful at a glance. “Thanks for reaching out!” is useless when you’re staring at a list of 30 templates at speed. The name is the UX. Treat it like one.

Use actual usage data. In TextExpander, usage tracking is built in: you can see which Snippets your team triggers most often. In a shared Google Doc, a simple “Last used” column works fine. Either way, data beats gut instinct for deciding what to keep, update, or retire.

If your team handles sensitive email (financial, legal, or healthcare), template access controls matter more than most teams think. TextExpander’s permission system lets you separate what different team members can see and edit. Worth configuring deliberately before you share widely.