Outlook Web Access is a great tool. I use it alot to check my email from home or when I’m on the road and it works well. That is until you replace your website and mess around in IIS too much. Which is what happened to ours. It quit working altogether at first and then I managed to get to the point that you could log in and read email, but you couldn’t send new messages, reply to existing email and you couldn’t delete email. It came down to some problem with permissions related to the virtual directories that Microsoft Exchange creates to handle the Outlook Web Access.
I poked around the internet looking for solutions and tried a few things only to make it worse. So I decided to just delete the virtual directories and figure out how to recreate them. I found an article on Microsoft’s support site (surprisingly enough) that told how to remove the virtual directories and get Exchange to recreate them for you.
One word of advice, when there are step by step instructions, it’s best to do each step. I had skipped a step and couldn’t figure out why the directories were not being re-created. The step I skipped requires downloading the IIS 6 Resource Kit Tools and running the metabase explorer to delete a some keys. Apparently they meant it when they put this step in the instructions.
So after following the directions and restarting the Microsoft Exchange System Attendant service the virtual directories were recreated and Outlook Web Access returned to it’s normal useful self.