Why Exchange Online hates journal mailboxes

Microsoft positions Office 365 as being capable of servicing the needs of even the largest businesses and offers proof points such as the recent announcement that Microsoft and HP will work together to move 600,000 users of the U.S. Veterans Administration to the cloud. All good stuff and I’m sure that the VA will enjoy using Office 365 over the five-year contract term.

But not every customer finds the same joy in Office 365. I guess it’s impossible to please everyone. A recent discussion informed me that Exchange Online explicitly forbids the use of a cloud mailbox as a journal recipient. “So what?” you might ask, especially if you’re not one of the suspicious types that views journaling as a very good thing. Journaling, after all, captures messages as they pass through Exchange’s transport system so that they can be used for other purposes later on. For instance, proving that someone has done something that they should really not have. You get the picture.

The on-premises version of Exchange allows customers to deploy journaling on a per-database or per-user basis, the latter being an extended feature that requires the purchase of an Enterprise Client Access License (CAL) for everyone who uses it. When you enable journaling, you have to nominate a journal recipient. This is the address to which Exchange will direct journal reports (the copies of captured messages). It might be a mailbox in an Exchange or, more usually, an SMTP address is specified to have journal reports sent to an external system, perhaps one that is purpose-designed to handle the high volume of items that might be captured if journaling is used extensively.

It’s quite logical to think that a cloud-based mailbox might be a splendid journal recipient. After all, these mailboxes are on Exchange servers and managed by Microsoft in a highly-available environment. Exchange Online servers are capable of hosting very large mailboxes. All-in-all, everything seems perfect.

Not so. Microsoft prohibits the use of a cloud mailbox as a journal recipient. If you look at the Microsoft Office 365 for Enterprise Service Description (page 37), you see:

“Using transport rules to copy messages to an Exchange Online mailbox for the purposes of archiving is not permitted.”

Office 365 Help also says:

“Journaling mailbox   The journaling mailbox is used for collecting journal reports. How the journaling mailbox is configured depends on your organization's policies, regulatory requirements, and legal requirements. You can specify one journaling mailbox to collect messages for all the journal rules configured in the organization, or you can use different journaling mailboxes for different journal rules or sets of journal rules. The journaling mailbox specified in a journal rule must be external to your organization.”

It all seems pretty clear. Microsoft does not want you to use a cloud mailbox as a journal recipient, even if you run a hybrid Exchange organization.

The question therefore is why this restriction exists. I can think of a few reasons:

I doubt that Office 365 will change its stance on journal mailboxes. It creates far too many potential issues for little return. If you’re in the situation where you want to enable journaling, you are better off using a service that’s purpose-built for journaling. Or if you’re determined to use Exchange, think about discussing your needs with a hosting partner who’s willing to customize their service (for an additional cost). Lots of companies offer hosted Exchange – it’s their willingness to bend and flex to satisfy customers that creates their added value over a “pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap” service like that offered by Office 365.

And if you try to get around the rules (for instance, by forwarding journalled messages from one Office 365 tenant to another), then Microsoft can step in and stop that activity.

Using journaling, transport rules, or auto-forwarding rules to copy messages to an Exchange Online mailbox for the purposes of archiving is not permitted. Microsoft reserves the right to deny unlimited archiving in instances where a mailbox archive is not being used in a personal scenario.

Like anything else in life, you get what you pay for…

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