Recalled Messages
Soon you'll be able to recall external emails in different M365 tenants
I saw this recent announcement, and of course, started thinking about the eDiscovery impacts.
Cross-Tenant Message Recall in Exchange Online
With Cross-Tenant Message Recall, a tenant admin can add other Microsoft 365 tenants to an allow list. Once a tenant is on the list, senders from those allow-listed tenants can recall messages they’ve sent to recipients in the receiving tenant – just as they would for an intra-tenant recall.
Control sits with the receiving tenant – the organization whose users received the messages. A cross-tenant recall is only honored when the receiving tenant’s admin has explicitly allow-listed the sender’s tenant. This keeps the receiving organization in full control of which external tenants are permitted to recall messages from its users’ mailboxes. The feature is disabled by default; no cross-tenant recall occurs until an admin adds at least one tenant to the allow list.
When I was considering how this would work in terms of how a mailbox on hold would treat the recalled message, or whether recalled messages would go through the deletion process, etc. I realized something. Since the release of cloud-based message recall in 2023, I had never tested what happened in the recipient mailbox when a message was recalled.
Before I considered the possible implications on cross-tenant recalls when this rolls out - which I may or may not be able to test; that’s a little complicated to test as an individual - I wanted to see what happened with an internal message recall.
What I found wasn’t that surprising. After a successful recall, the message was not visible to the recipient in Outlook, but the eDiscovery tool was able to get a copy of it from the hidden areas of the Exchange mailbox.
Let’s look at the details:
