Back in 2023, Microsoft had announced a new cloud-based message recall feature for Exchange Online. The classic Outlook for Windows had a client-based message recall feature that was less reliable. The new cloud-based message recall feature drastically increases recall success rates and doesn"t require users to have their Outlook for Windows app open to perform the recall operation.
Today, Microsoft announced several new updates and improvements to the cloud-based message recall feature based on customer feedback.
Optional Recall Notifications for Recipients
Previously, when a message was recalled, Exchange Online would silently delete it from a recipient"s mailbox. Recipients who had already read the message before it was recalled could get confused about the message"s disappearance. To reduce this confusion, tenant admins now have a new feature to send recall notification emails to recipients when a message is recalled. Admins can enable this feature for either all recalled messages or only for read recalled messages.
Maximum Recallable Message Age
Previously, message recall could be done at any time without restrictions. For example, you could recall a 10-day-old email message. Some customers wanted the ability to restrict recalling older messages. The new Maximum Recallable Message Age setting will allow admins to do exactly that. The default value of the Maximum Recallable Message Age setting will be 365 days. However, admins can configure it between 5 minutes and 10 years.
Support for External Round-trip Routing
The Message Recall feature doesn"t support recalling messages sent outside the Exchange Online service. However, some admins route their intra-tenant mail out of Exchange Online to a third-party service or on-premises systems for additional processing. In these scenarios, the Message Recall feature will not work. Microsoft is now fixing this by supporting the recall of intra-tenant messages that route externally and then back into Exchange Online for delivery.
All three improvements are now available for all Exchange Online tenants globally. You can learn more about them here on the official Microsoft Tech Community blog post.