How to create an extended message trace report in Office 365

Problem:

You would like to generate an extended message trace report in a CSV file, e.g. for diagnostic purposes.

Solution:

This short video shows how to run an extended message trace in Exchange Online:

There are various types of message traces you can run but, for diagnostic purposes, you should prepare an extended message trace report because it contains the most comprehensive information about mail flow.

Exchange Online allows you to view message traces online or generate CSV reports with extended message trace. Extended message traces in the CSV format are particularly useful for diagnostic purposes. To learn how to generate them in Microsoft 365 (Office 365), follow the guidelines below.

1. Log in to the Exchange admin center.
2. Go to Mail flow > Message trace > Custom queries > Start a trace (Fig. 1.) to open a pane where you can customize a new message trace job.

Fig. 1. Launching a new message trace configuration pane.

3. To be able to generate the extended message trace report, you need to narrow down the trace results to at least a sender, a recipient, or a message ID (see Fig. 2.). Of course, you can provide more senders or recipients or define both senders and recipients if you wish.

Fig. 2. Sender defined for the extended message trace report.

4. Next, define a time range for your message trace. You can specify time range by using either the slider (see Fig. 2.) or special controls (see Fig. 3.) available after clicking Custom time range:
   • If you use the slider, the time range you set is relative to the current date.
   • When using the Custom time range controls, you can set an absolute time range where the start date and the end date are defined precisely.

Fig. 3. Custom time range controls let you precisely set the period to be covered in your message trace report.

5. Now, you can use the filtering options to narrow down the messages that will be included in the report.

   Tip

   If you would like to create a trace report for a specific message, use the Message ID filter. Learn how to find the Message-ID of an email

6. Finally, choose Extended report as the report type (Fig. 4.). Once you are ready, click Next at the bottom.

   Important

   In the case of the Enhanced summary and Extended reports, the last 24 hours of message trace data might not be included.

Fig. 4. Choosing Extended report as the report type.

7. In the last step of the wizard, you can change the title of your report as well as specify the email address which a notification will be send to once your report is ready. To finally add the message trace job for execution, click the Prepare report button (Fig. 5.).

Fig. 5. The final step of the message trace job wizard.

You can check the status of your message trace report completion by going to the Downloadable reports tab. Here, the Status column will show the current status of all the message trace jobs you’ve added (Fig. 6.).

Fig. 6. Checking the statuses of message trace jobs.

To download the CSV file with a completed report, go to the Downloadable reports tab (see Fig. 6.) and select the report. In the pane that opens, click Download the report (Fig. 7.), wait for the file to finish processing, and save it to a chosen location on your computer.

Fig. 7. Downloading a completed extended message trace report.

See also:

• Parsing an extended message trace - a Microsoft blog article on extracting data from an extended message trace
• Message Trace FAQ - see this Microsoft article to learn how to run a message trace via PowerShell