Create Journal Rules

Applies to: Office 365 for enterprises, Live@edu

As an administrator, you can use journal rules to record, or "journal", e-mail message communication in your organization. This can help your organization respond to legal, regulatory, and organizational compliance requirements.

A journal rule defines the messages you want to record, for example, messages sent to specific users or messages sent to recipients outside your organization. The results of a journal rule are e-mail messages called journal reports that contain the specified e-mail messages as unaltered attachments.

Before you create journal rules, we recommend you specify a recipient to receive journal report non-delivery reports (NDRs) so you reduce the risk of losing journal reports. For more information, see Specify a Recipient for Undeliverable Journal Reports.

Create a journal rule

1. Select Manage My Organization > Mail Control > Journal Rules > New.
2. Enter the following information:
   • * If the message is sent to or from...   This defines the recipients you want to journal. The choices are the following:
     • A specific user   Select a recipient from the shared address book to journal. The messages that are actually journaled depend on the scope of the journal rule you select next. If you specify a group, the individual members of the group are journaled.
     • Apply to all messages   All recipients are journaled. The messages that are actually journaled depend on the scope of the journal rule you select next.
   • * Journal the following messages...   This defines the scope of the journal rule. The choices are the following:
     • All messages   Journal all messages regardless of source or destination.
     • Internal messages only   Journal messages sent from internal senders that include at least one internal recipient. If the sender is internal, but all the recipients are external, the message isn't journaled. If the sender is external and recipient is internal, the message isn't journaled.
     • External messages only   Journal messages sent to and from recipients outside your organization.
   • *** Send journal reports to:   **Type the e-mail address that you want to store the journal reports generated by the journal rule. This is called the journaling mailbox.
     Note   A journaling mailbox can contain sensitive information. It's a good idea to create organization-wide policies that govern who can access the journaling mailboxes in your organization and limit access to only those individuals who have a direct need to access them.
   • **Name of rule   **By default, the name of the journal rule is automatically generated from the journal recipients. If there are existing journal rules that contain the same journal recipients, numbers are automatically appended to the journal rule name to avoid duplicates.
     You may choose to override the automatically-generated name by typing in a custom name. Just make sure the name is unique and descriptive.
3. When you are finished, click Save.
   Note   If you didn't configure a recipient to receive NDRs for undeliverable journal reports, you'll get a warning message.