Ivan Fioravanti, Co-founder and CTO for CoreView, uses his system engineer and .NET development skills to lead CoreView’s technology team. He’s passionate about AI, automation and all things Microsoft 365.
Why Message Tracing Matters for Microsoft 365 Administrators
Tracing messages is a crucial task for Microsoft 365 administrators to diagnose mail delivery issues, audit activity, and maintain compliance. This guide covers three up-to-date methods to perform message traces using Exchange Online and CoreView.
Tracing messages is a crucial task for Microsoft 365 administrators to diagnose mail delivery issues, audit activity, and maintain compliance. This guide covers three up-to-date methods to perform message traces using Exchange Online and CoreView.
How to Run a Message Trace Using the Exchange Admin Center
To run a message trace, you need to be a member of one of the following role groups:
Global Administrator
Exchange Administrator
For more information, see the following Microsoft guides:
Leverage PowerShell for automated or advanced message tracing using the Exchange Online PowerShell V2 Module (EXO V2).
Setting Up PowerShell for Exchange Online Tracing
Open PowerShell and connect to Exchange Online:
Connect-ExchangeOnline
Basic message trace:
Get-MessageTrace
This returns messages from the last 48 hours if no parameters are specified.
Example:
# Trace messages sent by john@contoso.com within a specific date range
Get-MessageTrace -SenderAddress john@contoso.com -StartDate 12/20/2022 -EndDate 12/30/2022
Notes:
Get-MessageTrace retrieves data from the past 10 days only. Searching further back will produce an error.
To search for data older than 10 days, use the following:
Start-HistoricalSearch
Get-HistoricalSearch
By default, up to 1,000 results are returned.
For large searches, consider dividing the query by using smaller -StartDate and -EndDate intervals.
All output is in UTC, which may differ from the time format used for the -StartDate and -EndDate parameters.
Ensure your account has appropriate Exchange Online roles.