The feature, available in the Apps control panel, has long been requested by IT administrators of the cloud collaboration and email suite, according to Priya Mathew, Google Apps senior strategist.

"Gmail log search will make it easier to answer questions like: What happened to an inbound or outbound message? Was a message sent to my domain and marked as spam? Which users sent or received a specific message?" Mathew wrote .

Using the tool, IT administrators can query email message information such as sender, recipient, subject, data, total transit time and delivery status.

"Gmail log search will help domain admins have the same type of visibility into the operations of Google Apps that they are used to from the legacy, on-premise email systems," he wrote.

Gmail log search, built on the Google cloud-based data analysis service, will be available starting Tuesday for Google Apps for business, education and government customers.