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I'm trying to migrate a small company from an ancient, on-premise Linux mail server over to Exchange Online. One of their core requirements is that they need copies of all inbound and outbound e-mail to be saved in a separate mailbox called "group", where none of the messages can be deleted.

My understanding was that journaling could do this, but as I'm preparing to enable it, the documentation seems to say that you can't journal to another Exchange Online mailbox, so I'm a little puzzled as to how this works with Exchange Online.

Can someone explain how this could be done with or without journaling?

jhilgeman
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  • Note - it seems I can do this with mail flow rules and BCCing the mailbox, but I'm not sure how that's technically different from journaling. – jhilgeman Apr 07 '21 at 05:29

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This is correct. You can't journal to an Exchange Online mailbox. You'll need to use an external mailbox or journaling service/appliance.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/exchange/security-and-compliance/journaling/configure-journaling

If this is a business/company requirement then don't try to "trick out" Exchange Online with BCC'ing or any other method. Use an appropriate journaling service. You don't want to be in a position of having to explain to the customer why you can't retrieve an email for them if they have a need (legal) for the email in question. Explain to them that if this is a business/company requirement that there will be additional costs involved.

joeqwerty
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    +1 - also, if you want "poor man" retention for Legal, you can enable Litigation Hold on all mailboxes from Day 1. That will cover all the bases and not clutter mailboxes, and would require using eDiscovery to find what's needed during a "case", etc. (also, miss you guys here at SF Joe...just not on here often anymore) – TheCleaner Apr 07 '21 at 14:44
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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.

Or Mail flow rules: Office 365 Journaling Workaround - How to Guide https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/34533.office-365-journaling-workaround-how-to-guide.aspx

Jayce
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  • Is there any update on this thread? If the issue has been resolved, please mark the helpful replies as answers – Jayce Apr 26 '21 at 06:09