ABSTRACT

Ever wondered how you can make an Office 365

Mailbox as a journaling mailbox? Let us see how we
can do that in this step by step guide.

Author: Dileepa Kariyawasam

Blog: www.cloudarcs.net

JOURNALING IN OFFICE 365

A workaround explained….
Author: Dileepa Kariyawasam Blog: www.cloudarcs.net

Many of you have asked me if there is a Journaling facility in Office 365. The answer to this is Yes as well
as No. The reason being Office 365 does not allow you to designate a mailbox which is hosted on Office
365 as a journaling mailbox.

The only option we have as techies is to designate a mailbox which is located in an On-Prem exchange
server or a third party journaling solutions provider.

So how do we overcome this issue since some of us will be reluctant to buy a subscription from a third
party provider for their journaling.

In Office 365, we can use a workaround to get this done by using Mail Flow Rules in Exchange Online. Let
us see how we can do that.

First log into your Office 365 Portal using the Admin credentials.

Then go to your Exchange Online Admin Center as shown below in Fig1 and under the Mail Flow section,
select “Rules”.

Fig1

+
Once inside the Mail Flow rules section, click on the “ ” sign and select “Create a new rule” as shown
below in Fig2.
Author: Dileepa Kariyawasam Blog: www.cloudarcs.net

Fig2

Once you click on “Create a new rule”, the new rule dialog box will pop up where you will have to
configure the settings for your new rule.

Under the Name section of the new rule, give a name you like which can be easily identifiable to the action
you want the rule to do. In this case I am going to name it as “Journaling Workaround”. Then click on
“Apply this rule if” section for you to get a list of drop down options from which we are going to select
“the sender is located” option since we want to have all the emails from senders within our organization
to be recorded as shown in Fig3.

Once that is selected, click on “Select One” on to the left hand side as shown in the below diagram Fig4
to bring up the “Select Sender Location” option box. Since we want the senders located inside our
organizations emails to be tracked, select “Inside the organization” option from the drop down menu.

Once done, click on “OK”.

Author: Dileepa Kariyawasam Blog: www.cloudarcs.net

Fig3

Fig4

Once that is done, we have to no tell the rule what needs to be done. For that we need to go to the “Do
the following” section and select “Bcc the message to” option from the drop down menu as shown below
in Fig5.
Author: Dileepa Kariyawasam Blog: www.cloudarcs.net

Fig5

Once selected it will prompt you to select the mail box that you need to Bcc all the messages which are
sent by the sender of the organization. In this case I am going to select the mailbox I have created for the
journaling purpose named journaling@cloudarcs.net as shown below in Fig6 and select “Ok”.

Fig6
Author: Dileepa Kariyawasam Blog: www.cloudarcs.net

Once all the above is done, make sure you select “Enforce” to enforce the rule immediately. By default,
this is enabled and makes sure you leave it as is too and click on “Save” as shown below in Fig7.

Fig7

That’s it folks, now you should be getting messages Bcc’ed to the mailbox you provided when users in
your organization sends any email out. Likewise, if you need to record all the emails which comes in to
your organization, simply create another mail rule selecting “If the sender is located” and set the value
to “Outside the organization”.