Promodag Blog

The GDPR regulation directly impacts Exchange messaging systems and Promodag Reports helps ensure compliance through four key capabilities. The tool can verify prior consent by extracting newsletter recipient lists, enable data portability by inventorying personal emails, protect against data leaks by auditing mailbox access permissions and support the right to be forgotten by identifying messages containing personal identifiable data (PID). These reports allow administrators to periodically review and manage personal data in accordance with GDPR requirements.

The Office 365 Get-MessageTrace command, when used to track distribution group usage, is limited to only 7 days of data and provides minimal information: it does not show the senders or the subjects of the emails. Promodag Reports offers a much more powerful solution by creating, importing, and storing tracking logs in a database, which allows for generating reports covering much longer time periods with much more detailed information. The solution generates faster and clearer reports that can identify both active and unused distribution groups and allows them to be exported to multiple formats, unlike PowerShell scripts which only allow export to CSV format.

Version 10 of Promodag Reports introduces a new licensing policy to accommodate Office 365, shifting from a model based exclusively on per-server licenses for on-premises Exchange to a hybrid model: per server for on-premises environments, and per mailbox for Office 365. When migrating an environment to Office 365, existing licenses will be converted to per-mailbox licenses covering the same number of mailboxes as those previously hosted on Exchange servers. Organizations operating hybrid environments during the migration may need to purchase temporary licenses to cover both on-premises servers and Office 365 mailboxes simultaneously.

The Get-Recipient command doesn't return any result if run without any parameter.

Promodag Reports includes a convenient feature that allows you to view and filter all messages associated with a specific recipient. To access this feature, simply right-click on a recipient in the organizational tree, select “Linked Messages” and specify a date range to generate a sortable table containing all associated messages. This option supports advanced multi-criteria filtering via a filter editor that allows you to search by keywords in the subject line or other parameters to quickly find specific messages sent to or received by a mailbox.

StoreLog 4 allows users to automate the retrieval of Office 365 message tracking logs by creating a batch file through the Schedule Generation of Office 365 Message Tracking option. Users can then schedule this batch file to run automatically using Windows Task Scheduler by creating a basic task that executes StoreLog.exe with the batch file as an argument. The scheduled task can be configured to run daily and set to run whether the user is logged in or not, ensuring continuous automated log collection without manual intervention.

Office 365 tracking logs are essential for analyzing email traffic and conducting forensic investigations, but Microsoft only retains this data for 10 days. Retrieving it via PowerShell is particularly tedious: it is limited to 5,000 messages per command, and the results are returned in reverse chronological order. StoreLog 4 solves these issues by automatically retrieving and formatting hourly logs, then organizing them chronologically in the familiar on-premises Exchange format. This freeware facilitates archiving, searching, and importing into a database, enabling organizations to retain critical data well beyond the 10-day expiration limit.

StoreLog is a free utility that retrieves and imports Exchange tracking logs (including Office 365) into an SQL or Access database, thereby resolving the issue of short data retention in Exchange Online. Users simply need to configure an Office 365 administrator account in StoreLog: the tool then automatically queries Office 365 to generate hourly log files in standard Exchange format, including key fields such as sender, recipient, subject, status, and message size. These archived logs can then be opened manually in a text editor or imported into a database to run SQL queries, or used to generate traffic reports with Promodag Reports, enabling long-term monitoring and in-depth analysis beyond the retention limit imposed by Microsoft.