Message Trace in Exchange Online Office 365

In Office 365, permissions are required to trace messages like;

– Security Admin
– Security Reader
– View-Only Recipients
– Compliance Admin
– Data Loss Prevention

By default, role group Organization Management has all of the required permissions.

There are TWO Methods to track messages in Office 365PowerShell and EAC.

Office 365 message tracing using PowerShell

Check the below cmdlet:

Get-MessageTrace -RecipientAddress <user’s address=""> -StartDate 12/07/2018 -EndDate 12/14/2018</user’s>

The above cmdlet will shows all mail flow between the defined dates. If it does not give all the required details, just need to do some changes and specify the properties you need, like FromIP or Size.

Get-MessageTrace -RecipientAddress <user’s address=""> -StartDate 12/07/2018 -EndDate 12/14/2018 | Format-list -Property Received,SenderAddress,Status,MessageTraceId</user’s>

The above cmdlet will provide lots of information to find the right message.

In order to check why the delivery failed, you will need the Get-MessageTraceDetail.

Get-MessageTrace -RecipientAddress <user’s address=""> -StartDate 12/07/2018 -EndDate 12/14/2018 -Status Failed | Get-MessageTraceDetail</user’s>

Here you can easily see why the delivery failed.

You can run Start-HistoricalSearch for emails older than a week.

Start-HistoricalSearch -ReportTitle "Trace1" -ReportType MessageTrace -SenderAddress a.xyz@dev01.onmicrosoft.com -StartDate 12/01/2018 -EndDate 12/07/2018 -NotifyAddress a.xyz@dev01.onmicrosoft.com

Message tracking in Office 365 using EAC

Here is a step by step how to trace messages in office 365 using EAC

1. Open office.portal.com in your web browser.

2. Then log in with the global administrator account.

3. Go to admin center and here expand Admin centers and then click Exchange.

4. In Exchange admin center dashboard, click on ‘message trace’ under the mail flow.

5. Here you have to choose an interval which you want to search the email messages from ‘’Date range drop down’. Then you have to select the status of messages which you are searching for.

6. If you want you can narrow down the search by adding sender and recipient email addresses.

7. Click search

8. The search will return the list for further details you can double-click on the individual message to get it’s more information including the status report.