Help Topic: Auto Journaling Office365

Introduction

Journaling allows you to meet your organization’s archiving requirements. You can create Journal rules and have messages matching the rule’s conditions delivered to the journaling address specified in the rule. Here are two things you need to know before you start creating Journal rules.

Select an alternate Journaling address for undeliverable Journal reports

Before you can create a Journal rule in Exchange Online, you must specify the alternate Journaling recipient for undeliverable journal reports. If a journal report can’t be delivered to the Journaling mailbox specified in a Journal rule, it is queued in Exchange Online for some time. If the condition persists for a longer period and queued Journal reports can’t be delivered to the Journaling mailbox, they’re delivered to the alternate Journaling recipient.

Specifying a Journaling mailbox

A Journaling mailbox is the mailbox or recipient that receives Journal reports for messages that match a Journal rule’s conditions. You can specify different Journaling mailboxes for different Journal rules. For example, you can create a Journal rule to journal messages sent or received by users in Europe and another one to journal messages sent or received by users in North America, and configures each rule to deliver journal reports to an address in their own geography. Or configure different Journal rules for users in the Finance and Legal departments and similarly, have the journal reports delivered to different addresses.

Exchange Online doesn’t support delivering journal reports to an Exchange Online mailbox. You must specify the email address of an on-premises archiving system or a third-party archiving service as the Journaling mailbox.

How to configure Journaling

First, logon to the Office365 Online Portal (portal.office365.com) as the Administrator and select the Exchange option from the Admin centers menu on the left hand side of the screen:

Once in the Exchange Admin Center, select the journal rules option within the compliance management section:

The first thing to set up is the undeliverable journal reports recipient which can be set by clicking the Select address link:

Please note that any mail sent to the address above used for undeliverable journal reports will not be journalled and will not honor transport and mailbox rule settings.  It is therefore that you create a dedicated mailbox for undeliverable journal reports such as ndr@yourdomain.com.

Once the undeliverable reports has been set up, you can then set up the Journaling rules for specific mailboxes or all users using the + button, creating new rules as required for each user, group or region of mailboxes:

Please enter the following information in the fields provided:

Click the Save button to confirm and add the new rule to Exchange.