How to create an email message template in Outlook?

I send the same onboarding email a dozen times a week and rebuild it from a draft every time, which keeps getting accidentally sent or edited.

Outlook 2016. How do I make a proper reusable template?

Outlook has a real template format, OFT, that behaves exactly how you want: opening it spawns a fresh message and the template itself never changes.

1

Compose the message with subject, body and any attachments.

2

File, Save As, set Save as type to Outlook Template (*.oft). Outlook saves it to your Templates folder by default, keep that location.

3

To use it: New Items, More Items, Choose Form, set the Look In dropdown to User Templates in File System, pick your template, Open.

4

A fresh message opens from the template. Edit the recipient and any per person lines, send. The OFT on disk stays untouched.

Two shortcuts worth knowing. Pin the OFT file itself to your taskbar or a desktop folder, double clicking it opens a new message directly, skipping the Choose Form dig. And if the boilerplate is a paragraph rather than a whole message, Quick Parts on the Insert tab drops saved blocks into any message, which is faster for snippets.

Made the OFT and pinned it next to my other shortcuts. Double click, fill the name, send. Exactly what I needed.