Import Past M365 Emails

Import past emails from M365 and pushes them through xorlab for analysis (Retrospective Email Scanning). This is intended as a one-time onboarding step for a new tenant or customer. It can only be used for domains that are not already inline with xorlab.

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What you achieve

With Retrospective Email Scanning, you can:

• Import past emails from M365 for one tenant
• Speed up the initial learning phase
• Observe imported emails in the normal xorlab message view

Imported emails are processed similarly to live emails. In the message list, the Received date remains the original date of the message, not the import date.

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Before you start

1. Add your tenant to shared/guarded_tenants.yml. An example can be found here.
2. Customize detection for that tenant. For standard onboardings, this only includes adding list entries: Configure built-in lists.
3. Complete Create Entra ID App.

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Configure Microsoft Graph permissions

Set up Microsoft permissions:

1. Follow exactly as described in Configure Entra ID for Case Isolation. If you have done that already for case isolation, then this step is not necessary anymore.
   Same credentials as case isolation Retrospective Email Scanning uses the same Graph credentials as Case Isolation.

The application must include these permissions:

• Mail.Read
• User.Read.All

The Graph credential is currently shared between the Retrospective Email Scanning and Case Isolation. If you also use Case Isolation, Mail.Read must be replaced with Mail.ReadWrite.

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Add the Graph credentials in xorlab

1. Open the Admin view in xorlab.
2. Select the tenant for which you want to run the import.
3. Open Microsoft 365.
4. Add the Tenant ID, Application (client) ID, and Client Secret in the Credentials section.
5. Save the credentials.

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Start a new import

1. Open Admin → Microsoft 365 for the tenant.
   Choose a tenant If you have more than one tenant, you need to select one of them in the dropdown on top.
2. Click on New Import.
3. Enter a name for the import.
4. Set the time range to 3 months. Depending on the situation, this can be increased or decreased. However, for proper learning at least one month is required. For a quick test, you can choose a short time range of 1 hour.
5. Start the import.
   Tenant data reset Starting a new import job removes all past email data of that tenant.
6. After the import is through, you can continue with the normal M365 onboarding by either activating Inline or Monitoring.

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Additional information

The below chapters provide more information about the Retrospective Email Scanning itself.

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Important behavior

Only emails from the tenant domains defined in shared/guarded_tenants.yml are imported. If a guarded domain contains a pattern, xorlab strips the pattern and uses the base domain instead. Example:

• *.xorlab.com becomes xorlab.com

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Watch the import progress

An import job can have the following active states:

• INDEXING: xorlab is indexing the messages to be imported
• IMPORTING: xorlab is importing and processing the messages

An import job can finish in the following states:

• COMPLETED
• FAILED
• CANCELED

While a job is in the IMPORTING state, xorlab shows a progress bar in percent.

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Pause, resume, or cancel a job

• Jobs in the IMPORTING phase can be paused and resumed
• Jobs in the INDEXING phase cannot be paused
• If you want to stop a job during INDEXING, cancel it

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Restrictions

• Retrospective Email Scanning is not supported for tenants with active mail flow. In multi-tenant environments, tenants not affected by the import may still have mail flow activated
• The Sandbox is always disabled for imported messages, even if it is enabled elsewhere

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Required permissions

The following xorlab user permissions are required for Retrospective Email Scanning. The built-in xcc_admin role contains those already:

• xcc_mail_import_update: create, pause, resume, and cancel import jobs
• xcc_mail_import_read: view the status of import jobs

For details on custom roles and permissions, see Create a Custom Role.

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Related log events

The log events for Retrospective Email Scanning are the mail_import ones in Log Events. To forward them, start at Logging Overview.

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Next steps

• Either M365 Monitoring Mode or M365 Inline Mode