If you opened TemplateManager365 and your templates are gone, they have almost certainly not been deleted by the add-in. In nearly every case we have investigated, the templates were still in the mailbox and something had moved the folder they live in.
Work through this page in order.
First, check which store you are looking at
TemplateManager365 has two separate stores and they do not share templates:
- Mailbox Store — your own templates, stored in your mailbox.
- Group Store — templates shared with a Microsoft 365 group.
If you normally use the Group Store, make sure the right group is selected. Templates saved in one group are not visible in another, and if you have been removed from a group you will no longer see its templates.
Also check that you are signed in with the same account you saved the templates with. Signing in with a different work account shows you that account’s templates, which may be none at all.
Where Mailbox Store templates are actually kept
They are stored as items in a hidden folder named TemplateManager365 in your own mailbox.
The folder is hidden so it does not clutter your folder list and so templates are not changed by accident. It is a normal mail folder in every other respect — which is the reason for almost every disappearance we see.
Why templates disappear
An archive or retention policy moved or deleted the folder
This is the most common cause by a wide margin. Because the template folder is an ordinary mail folder containing items with old dates, a mailbox archive policy can move it into the online archive, and a retention policy can delete items from it. Neither is something you will see happen, and neither is something the add-in can prevent.
Ask whoever administers your Microsoft 365 tenant to check whether an archive or retention policy
applies to your mailbox, and whether it has acted on a folder called TemplateManager365.
The folder was renamed or moved
Renaming the folder, or dragging it somewhere else in the mailbox, can make it invisible to older versions of the add-in.
You are signed in to a different account or store
See the section above.
How to get them back
If an archive policy moved them, the folder will be in your online archive mailbox. It is hidden there too, so an administrator will usually need to look for it. Once the folder is moved back into the primary mailbox, the templates reappear.
If a retention policy deleted them, they may still be recoverable from Recoverable Items for a limited period. This is time-sensitive — raise it with your administrator as soon as you notice.
If you deleted a template yourself, check the Deleted Items folder of the mailbox.
For Group Store templates, the files live in the group’s document library, in a folder called
TemplateManager365. SharePoint keeps deleted files in the site recycle bin for a period, and
earlier versions of a file can be restored from its version history.
How to stop it happening again
Ask your administrator to exclude the TemplateManager365 folder from archive and retention
policies, or to apply a policy to your mailbox that does not move or delete items in it.
This is worth doing before you build up a large library of templates. It is the single most effective thing you can do to protect them.
There is no limit on how many templates you can have
We are asked this regularly, usually by someone who has just lost templates and assumed they hit a quota. TemplateManager365 does not cap the number of templates, folders or users.
If templates seemed to vanish as you added new ones, that is not a quota — it is one of the causes above, and it is worth investigating rather than working around.
This is not Microsoft’s “My Templates”
Outlook used to include a separate Microsoft feature called My Templates. It is not the same thing as TemplateManager365, and changes Microsoft makes to it do not affect your TemplateManager365 templates.
If your Microsoft My Templates content has gone, that is a Microsoft change rather than something we can restore. Templates you saved in TemplateManager365 are unaffected.