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Announcing General Availability (GA) of the New Message Trace in Exchange Online

The_Exchange_Team's avatar
The_Exchange_Team
Platinum Contributor
Jun 03, 2025

Update 8/25/2025: Added more information and updated timeline related to legacy message trace support in Reporting Webservice.

Today, we are excited to announce the GA of the new Message Trace in the Exchange admin center (EAC) in Exchange Online for our WW customers. We will begin rolling out in mid-June and complete rollout in July. Like in Public Preview, administrators will be able to access the new Message Trace and its capabilities by default when navigating to the Exchange admin center > Mail flow > Message Trace. We received a lot of great feedback on the new message trace design, performance, and feature parity throughout Public Preview and will begin the transition to the new Message Trace experience.  If you wish to give us additional feedback, please do so in Exchange admin center > Give Feedback.

Throttling limits

To reduce the risk of misuse and abuse of Exchange Online resources, ensure services availability for all users, and provide a predictable experience for our customers, we will implement a rate-based throttling limit based on the number of requests in a time period. For a tenant, a maximum of 100 query requests will be accepted within a 5-minute running window. Throttling is automatically not applied if the request rate is lower than 100 requests in the past 5 minutes. If your tenant has automation set up to query more frequently than the throttling threshold, please update your automation to fit below the throttling limit.

Cmdlet

Tenant level limit

Get-MesesageTraceV2 

100 requests per 5 min  

Get-MessageTraceDetailV2 

100 requests per 5 min  

Old Message Trace interface and cmdlets deprecation timeline

We will continue to maintain the old Message Trace UX in Exchange admin center and cmdlets (Get-MessageTrace and Get-MessageTraceDetail) alongside the new Message Trace interface and cmdlets (Get-MessageTraceV2 and Get-MessageTraceDetailV2) for several months to ease the transition. The old Message Trace interface and cmdlets (Get-MessageTrace and Get-MessageTraceDetail) will begin deprecating for our WW customers starting September 1st, 2025.

Due to the customer feedback we've received, we will be delaying the legacy Message Trace support on Reporting Webservice until February 28th , 2026. Additionally, we will be onboarding the new Message Trace onto Graph API. The tentative timeline for Public Preview of the new Message Trace support on Graph API is November. Further details will be announced closer to the Public Preview release date.

Please note that this timeline applies to our WW environment only and does not affect GCC, GCC-High, DOD, or other sovereign clouds. Timeline for GCC, GCC-High, DoD, and other sovereign clouds will be provided in CY25H2.

What you need to do to prepare

  • Please use the new Message Trace user interface in Exchange Admin Center if you are not doing so already. The old Message Trace user interface will be deprecated starting September 1st, 2025.
  • If you have automation set up that leverages the old Message Trace cmdlets, then you should migrate to using the new Message Trace cmdlets by latest August-end 2025. Get-MessageTrace and Get-MessageTraceDetail will be deprecated starting September 1st, 2025.
  • For those that are leveraging Reporting Webservice to pull Message Trace data, please migrate to and leverage the new Message Trace PowerShell cmdlets by February 2026. The new Message Trace will not be available on Reporting Webservice and Message Trace support on Reporting Webservice will begin deprecating starting March, 2026.

Official cmdlet documentation for the new Message Trace cmdlets will be published by GA. Visit the Public Preview document to see our key changes from the old Message Trace.

Microsoft 365 Messaging Team

Updated Aug 25, 2025
Version 5.0

8 Comments

  • GrzeWier's avatar
    GrzeWier
    Copper Contributor

    How do I find emails sent to non-primary address of a mailbox ?

    This is RESOLVE event in Get-MessageTraceDetail

  • ppagdacom's avatar
    ppagdacom
    Copper Contributor

    it might be only me, but the search results are different. 
    basic search by recipient on New message trace => zero results. Toggle back to use the old one => a dozen of hits.
    it ain't a good start... 

  • saurabh-metron's avatar
    saurabh-metron
    Copper Contributor

    This also means that the API endpoint will not work?

    https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/office/developer/o365-enterprise-developers/jj984335(v=office.15)#rest-uris

    What API endpoint are we supposed to use for V2?

  • jonhalvorsen's avatar
    jonhalvorsen
    Copper Contributor

    It appears to me that these throttling limits are incredibly low.  The only thing that I use Get-MessageTrace for, is to pull an entire day's email activity to find out which messages are not using TLS encryption.  Microsoft does not provide any other method determine which messages are not using TLS.  When I query this information, it currently takes over a day to pull one day's worth of message trace information, which I believe is due to current throttling limits.  The results of my queries are regularly more than 150,000 rows.  With your new throttling limits, it appears that this will take more than 15 DAYS, to pull 150,000 rows of data.   Why would you put such incredibly low limits in place?  This makes it impossible to use.

    • jamnelso's avatar
      jamnelso
      Copper Contributor

      In addition, the fact that Exchange Online customers have no way to stream message trace logs internally (via an API) makes these throttling limits overly restrictive. In large organizations that are doing automation and have numerous support technicians tracing email for end users, a limit of 100 queries in 5 minutes could be hit fairly frequently.

  • jamnelso's avatar
    jamnelso
    Copper Contributor

    Do we know what "begin deprecating" actually means here? Are the legacy cmdlets going to actually stop working on September 1st, 2025? While this isn't a huge change, many of us are also trying to beat deadlines for AzureAD module deprecation.

  • Exchange Online Upgrades Its Message Tracing Capabilities

    Microsoft announced the GA for the new message tracing feature on June 3. The old code will be deprecated in September 2025, so it’s time to update any PowerShell scripts that use the Get-MessageTrace or Get-MessageTraceDetail cmdlets. Upgrading is easy (as demonstrated in two scripts) and shouldn’t take too long, once you find the time to do the work.

    https://office365itpros.com/2025/06/05/message-tracing-v2/