Recently, I was asked to find all emails sent to and from a particular user, from an external email address. The mailbox exists in Office365, so I hopped into Compliance Center, and started a new Content Search. In trying to fill out the form for the recipient, or participant, I realized that I could not choose or enter an external email address. When I try to enter an external SMTP address, it says that there is “No User Chosen”, and you cannot continue with creating the search.

To get around this, you can enter your search parameters in the “Keywords” box, and ignore the other fields, like so:

KEYWORDS:

(date=2019-07-30..2020-09-17)(senderauthor=localuser@localdomain.com)(senderauthor=remoteuser@externaldomain.com)(participants=localuser@localdomain.com)(participants=remoteuser@externaldomain.com)(participants=remoteuser2@otherexternaldomain.com)