How to Edit Outlook Emails: Received Messages, Drafts, and Sent Items

Outlook handles email editing differently depending on what you're trying to edit — a draft you haven't sent yet, a received message you want to annotate, or a sent message you wish you could change. Each scenario works differently, and knowing which one applies to your situation changes everything about the process.

Editing a Draft Email in Outlook

This is the most straightforward case. If you composed an email and saved it without sending, it lands in your Drafts folder.

To edit it:

1. Open Outlook and navigate to the Drafts folder in the left panel.
2. Click the message to open it.
3. The email opens in compose mode automatically — you can edit the subject line, body, recipients, and attachments.
4. Save it again or send when ready.

This works consistently across Outlook for Windows, Outlook for Mac, Outlook on the Web (OWA), and the Outlook mobile app. Draft editing is always fully supported.

Editing a Received Email in Outlook 🖊️

This surprises many users: Outlook actually lets you edit the content of a received email and save the changes locally. This is useful for annotating messages, adding notes, or removing irrelevant sections before forwarding internally.

Important: This does not change the email on the sender's end or on any other device. You're editing your local copy only.

How to edit a received email (Outlook for Windows)

1. Open the email you want to edit.
2. In the ribbon, click Edit Message — found under the Actions button or directly on the Message tab depending on your Outlook version.
3. The message body becomes editable. Make your changes.
4. Close the message. Outlook will prompt you to save changes.

This feature is available in Outlook for Windows (part of Microsoft 365 and older perpetual licenses like Outlook 2016, 2019, and 2021). It is not available in Outlook on the Web or the mobile apps — those platforms treat received messages as read-only.

Outlook version differences matter here

Recalling or Editing a Sent Email

This is where most frustration lives. Once an email is sent, you generally cannot edit it. What Outlook offers instead is a Recall This Message feature — but it comes with significant conditions.

How message recall works

1. Go to your Sent Items folder.
2. Open the message you want to recall.
3. On the Message tab, click Actions → Recall This Message.
4. Choose to either delete unread copies or delete and replace with a new message.

Recall only works when:

• Both you and the recipient use Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft 365 accounts within the same organization.
• The recipient has not yet opened the message.
• The email hasn't been moved out of the inbox by a rule or filter.

If you're sending to a Gmail address, an external domain, or someone who already opened the email, recall will fail silently or send an awkward recall notification without actually removing the original.

The "replace" option as an editing workaround

When recall gives you the delete and replace option, you're essentially composing a new email that overwrites the old one if the conditions above are met. This is the closest Outlook gets to "editing" a sent message. You write the corrected version during the recall process.

Editing Email Formatting and Display Options

Some users aren't trying to edit message content — they want to change how emails display or adjust formatting defaults for composing.

Changing your default email format

Outlook lets you compose in HTML, Rich Text, or Plain Text. To change the default:

• Go to File → Options → Mail → Compose messages
• Select your preferred format from the dropdown

HTML supports images and formatting. Plain Text is cleaner and more universally compatible. Rich Text is an older Microsoft-specific format that can cause formatting problems with non-Outlook recipients.

Changing font and style defaults

Under File → Options → Mail → Stationery and Fonts, you can set default fonts for new messages, replies, and forwarded emails independently. This affects every new email you compose going forward — not existing messages.

Variables That Affect What's Possible for You 🔧

The editing features available to you depend on several factors working together:

• Your Outlook version — Microsoft 365 subscribers get the most current features; perpetual license users (2016, 2019, 2021) may lack newer options
• Your email account type — Exchange and Microsoft 365 accounts unlock recall and some advanced features; IMAP/POP accounts don't support recall at all
• Your organization's settings — IT administrators can restrict or enable features like message recall or editing
• The platform you're using — desktop Outlook behaves very differently from the web or mobile versions
• Whether you're editing for yourself or others — local edits to received messages are invisible to anyone else, which matters for collaborative workflows

Someone running Outlook for Windows connected to a Microsoft 365 Exchange account within a corporate environment has nearly every editing option available. Someone using Outlook on the Web with a personal Outlook.com address has far fewer.

What you can actually do depends on which of these variables describes your setup — and that's a combination only you can see from where you're sitting.