Message Trace

Accessible from the Tenant section of the Dashboard, Message Trace lets you list messages, review delivery status such as delivered, failed, quarantined, and filtered as spam, and analyze the results directly in the grid.

You can quickly identify whether messages are internal or external, inbound or outbound and then retrieve selected messages from internal sender or recipient mailboxes for follow-up actions such as deleting or copying them.

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Load Options

Get messages sent within one of the periods below, or specify a custom date/time range within the last 90 days, up to 10 days long. Use advanced filters to narrow the results by subject, sender, recipient, and more. After loading, you can retrieve additional messages by adjusting these options.

Date/Time range

  • Last 10 days (Max)

  • Last 7 days

  • Last 24 hours

  • Last 60 minutes

  • Specify range

Specify a date range of 10 days or less

The From and Up to fields accept dates from the last 90 days, but if the selected range exceeds 10 days, the search returns an error.


Advanced filter option

Advanced filters help you target specific messages and reduce the number of messages returned.

The following properties are available:

Property

Description

From IP

The source IP address. For incoming messages, this is the public IP address of the SMTP server that sent the message. Must match exactly.

Graph ID

The Graph ID of the message. Must match exactly.

Message ID

The Message-ID header value of the message. Must match exactly.

Received on (UTC)

The date and time when the message was received by Exchange Online, shown in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time).

Recipient addresses

The SMTP email address of the recipient (the user the message was sent to). Must match exactly.

Use the OR or AND function to add more recipient addresses.

Sender address

The SMTP email address shown as the sender (the address the message claims to be from). Must match exactly.

Status

Can be set to one of the following: delivered, expanded, failed, filteredAsSpam, gettingStatus, pending, quarantined.

Subject

The subject line of the message. You can match the text using equals, begins with, or contains.

To IP

The destination IP address. For outgoing messages, this is the public MX IP of the recipient domain; for incoming messages to Exchange Online, this field is blank. Must match exactly.