Research and investigations into mail flow issues are common tasks for Office 365 administrators. These include checking on mail flow rules and fixing mail-delivery problems. Sometimes an email message gets lost in transit, or it takes a lot longer than expected for delivery, prompting end-users to ring the helpdesk and ask what happened. As an Office 365 admin you can use the CoreView message trace feature to track messages and identify the root cause of these problems from within a simple interface.

With message tracing, you can determine whether an email message was received, rejected, deferred, or delivered by the service, and exactly when those events occurred. It also shows exactly what routes the message took before reaching its final status.

As you can see in the example screen below, you simply need to input your search criteria based on information about the sender, recipients, date, time and subject of the message. Once you have submitted a query the search results are displayed quickly.

This tool is very useful to perform background checks on email messages that have caused a concern from an end-user and can help you get to the bottom of the problem so it can be remediated quickly before it impacts more users.

In addition, using our tenant segmentation capabilities (or V-tenants) you can partition access to message tracing. If you assign a specific administrator to ONLY view a subset of users, then that is the only group of users’ activities which will be shown in the Office 365 report for them to perform message trace searches.

Note**: Only operators that don’t belong to any specific V-tenants are allowed to make a search for either specific external email address in the Sender or Recipient search field or just by domain.com (i.e. gmail.com) to see all the emails sent/received that contain this domain.

These message trace reports can also be added to the ‘Favorite Report’ area by  clicking  on the star  icon  close the report name. This enables quick and easy access under the ‘Analyze’ tab  once you have logged into the  portal.

Curious  to view  this new message trace tool in action?  If you  are  already a customer running CoreView you can  find  this report by logging into the portal. Otherwise, take advantage  of  our  free 14-day trial  to check out the  most  advanced Office 365 management suite on the market.