If you submit a message trace with a custom date via the Exchange Online admin center, you’ll see this message:

From there, it can take anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours for your search results to be ready.

Or… You can pop over to PowerShell and, after connecting to Exchange Online, run your trace like this:

Get-MessageTrace -StartDate 3/22/2017 -EndDate 4/3/2017 -RecipientAddress email@address.com -SenderAddress email2@address.com

…and get your search results almost instantly.

Even better, you can filter your search results by subject line, which you can’t do in the admin center:

Get-MessageTrace -StartDate 3/22/2017 -EndDate 4/3/2017 -RecipientAddress email@address.com -SenderAddress email2@address.com | Where-Object {$_.Subject -eq “Good news, Joe!”}

And if that weren’t enough already, you can easily export the search results to a csv file by piping the output to “Export-CSV” like this:

Get-MessageTrace -StartDate 3/22/2017 -EndDate 4/3/2017 -RecipientAddress email@address.com -SenderAddress email2@address.com | Export-CSV C:\folder\file.csv

Happy tracing!