tracking read status of email messages in exchange online

Question

Currently our organization uses an exchange hybrid cloud model.

We want to track read status of email messages of a specific sender in the system. We tested using a user in the oprem to send to users in the online exchange, however I used the Get-MessageTrace command. -Sender mail@xyz -MessageSubject "abc" -Start (Get-Date).AddHours(-48) -EventId RECEIVE | Select MessageID to get the ID of user mail@xyz but the returned result is none. While it is also the address mail@xyz sent to mails in oprem, we can still use the above command to get the user's MessageID. Please help me regarding this case

Answer 1

Hi @Pham Tien Dung,

Thank you for posting to Microsoft Community. We are happy to help you.

 

To confirm with you, it seems like your issue is that you cannot use the Get-MessageTraceLog command with emails that user in onprem send to user in Exchange Online since the Get-MessageTrace you mentioned didn’t have the MessageSubject parameter.

If so, the reason why none result is returned with this command could be the command is available only in on-premises Exchange. For more information, you could refer to Get-MessageTrackingLog (ExchangePowerShell) | Microsoft Learn

However, you could also use Get-MessageTrace command to get the emails in Exchange Online with the command below to check the MessageID, Status and Subject etc.

Get-MessageTrace -SenderAddress mail@xyz -StartDate (Get-Date).AddHours(-48) -EndDate (Get-Date) | Format-table MessageTraceId, Subject, RecipientAddress,Status

You could refer to Get-MessageTrace (ExchangePowerShell) | Microsoft Learn for more information.

For reading status of email messages, no cmdlet within Exchange Online can do. Therefore, you cannot get the read status of a message by Get-MessageTrace. If you need the total numbers of read/unread messages for a period, you can find them in the Usage reports in the O365 Admin portal as below.

If you need those details on a per-message basis, you could refer EWS Powershell Script to find the ‘True’ Read Status of an email message | Microsoft Learn to get it from a EWS based script.

Hope it helps. If you have anything else to get help from me, please feel free to contact me.

Answer 2

The Get-MessageTrace will not give you the read status of a message, in fact no cmdlet within Exchange Online will, now that they removed Search-Mailbox. You will have to use an EWS or Graph API based solution, for example the Get-MgUserMessage cmdlet:

Connect-MgGraph -Scopes Mail.Read
Get-MgUserMessage -UserId user@domain.com -Filter {sender/emailAddress/address eq 'm365dev@microsoft.com'} -Top 5 | select Subject,IsRead

Answer 3

Hi @Noah Ma-MSFT

Thank you for your answer, I find it very practical for me

If you need those details on a per-message basis, you could refer EWS Powershell Script to find the ‘True’ Read Status of an email message | Microsoft Learn to get it from a EWS based script. -> However, when I access the Get-ReadStatus.ps1 scripts, I cannot download them

Is there any way you can help me?