If you have ever needed to find a ‘missing email’ for a user, then you have probably tried to check queues, consulted log files, and suggested that users look in their outbox, their sent items, and their junk mail folder; all to no avail. Exchange includes a great tool for checking on email messages called Exchange Message Tracking. This browser based tool can be accessed through OWA, and gives the Exchange admin a simple and quick to use interface for checking on email messages, whether they were sent from an internal user or to them from an external sender.

Message Tracking can be accessed either by launching the tool from the Exchange Management Console Toolbox, or from Outlook Web Access. The Toolbox takes you directly to the tool’s interface, while using OWA requires you to choose Options, Manage My Organization, Mail Control, Delivery Reports. Whichever way you choose to get there, you will need Exchange admin rights to check on messages for all users.
The browser interface requires you to select the mailbox that is either the sender or the receiver first. Then, you can run a search based on:

• Search for messages sent to:
• Search for messages received from:
• Search for these words in the subject line:

When searching for results that will include external users as either the sender or the recipient, you will still click the “Select users…” button. You can choose contacts from the GAL, or enter free-form email addresses in that dialog box. It’s a little confusing at first, but easy enough to use once you understand what you need to do. Also, you can search based either on the sender or the recipient; not both.

Once you have entered the criteria, the wizard will check the mailbox and provide the search results in the pane below. Select a message, and then click the details button to learn the status of the message. Messages delivered to internal mailboxes will provide much more information than those sent to external addresses, and can include the date and time the message was delivered, as well as the FQDN of the external system that delivered the message to your Exchange system. Outbound messages are not as data rich; about all it can tell you is the date and time the message was transferred to an external system. Final delivery, hostname, and other details are lacking.

The best part of the message tracking is that you can email the results at the click of a button. Since you are probably checking on the status of a message for some user, sending them the results is a great way to provide them with the information they requested. So the next time a user wants to know what happened to a message, use Exchange’s Message Tracking to let them know.

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