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Extending Message Trace to 90 days in Exchange Online

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The_Exchange_Team
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Feb 04, 2014

Message trace enables administrators to trace email messages as they pass through Exchange Online or Exchange Online Protection (EOP) service. It helps you determine whether a message was received, rejected, deferred, or delivered by the service.

You’ve told us that you need to be able to trace messages older than the current period of one week. We’re excited to announce that we’re increasing the look back period for message trace in Exchange Online to 90 days!

The existing functionality of looking up messages for the last week will persist and those results will be viewable immediately. When you search for messages older than a week, the request will be submitted as an extended message trace request. After the request has been processed, the trace results will be delivered to you in a CSV file by email. An example of an extended message trace request is shown below.

EO-ExtendingMessageTrace

We’re already rolling out this feature. Look for more details later this month.

This feature applies to Exchange Online and Exchange Online Protection services. On-premises customers have the capability to manage and search message tracking logs in Exchange Server.

Want to know more about this topic? Join the Exchange engineering team and MVPs at MEC 2014 for a chance to get your questions answered. Register today at IAMMEC.com.

Vandana Kumbla
Senior Program Manager

Published Feb 04, 2014
Version 1.0
  • Deleted's avatar
    Deleted
    Feb 05, 2014
    Right that is my point. Message Trace is not available on prem. No issue running from powershell.
  • Deleted's avatar
    Deleted
    Feb 05, 2014
    Online users get the cool GUI interface while onprem users get the crummy powershell interface. Figures. Well, at least the option is there, but wow, the Exchange team onprem sucks.
  • Deleted's avatar
    Deleted
    Feb 05, 2014
    @John B - What trace functionality are you looking for w/ on-prem? You can currently use OWA/ECP and/or powershell to search your tracking logs for on-prem. Once it leaves your org, the above is handy if you're already a EPO customer, but otherwise I don't

    see how this would benefit on-prem?

  • Deleted's avatar
    Deleted
    Feb 05, 2014
    Will this functionality be in SP1 for on prem?
  • Deleted's avatar
    Deleted
    Jan 01, 1970
    @abcd12356 1) The recipient_status column provides the status of the delivery of the message to the recipient. If the message was sent to multiple recipients, it will show all the recipients and the corresponding status against each, in the format: ##.

    For example, ##Receive, Send means that the message was received by the service and sent to the intended destination. ##Receive, Fail means that the message was received by the service but failed to be delivered to the intended destination. ##Receive, Deliver

    means that the message was received by the service and delivered to the recipient’s mailbox. 2) With regard to input criteria, you can provide the date and time range in which to search for message events. We do not offer search by message subject (is this

    what you meant by title?) at this point.

  • Deleted's avatar
    Deleted
    Jan 01, 1970
    Extending Message Trace to 90 days in Exchange Online
    thank you
  • Deleted's avatar
    Deleted
    Jan 01, 1970

    @John B: As mentioned in the post, on-premises customers can manage and search their own message tracking logs on their Exchange Server(s). By default, message tracking logs are retained for 30 days in Exchange 2013 and can be configured using

    Set-TransportService cmdlet. See

    Message Tracking and

    Configure Message Tracking for details.

  • Deleted's avatar
    Deleted
    Jan 01, 1970
    The inability to search by subject or content is a huge limitation for us. Any plans to implement this sorely lacking functionality?