Accessing OWA from Outlook

Use Outlook Anywhere (RPC over HTTP) if the administrator has it enabled. This works with Outlook 2003 and up.

Tip 240: Access OWA using Outlook

When you only have access to your Exchange Server through OWA and want to archive the contents, you need to access it as an http account. Use //owa.domain.com/exchange/username/ format for the HTTP URL in Outlook.

This only works with HTTP URLs, not HTTPS!

After you connect to your Exchange mailbox, you can drag messages to a pst on your hard drive to archive them.

Note that when you access your mailbox using the HTTP protocol, you cannot use the special folders: Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Journal. Notes are readable, but you can't create new notes.

Tip 241: More on Accessing OWA in Outlook

Yesterday’s tip works with both Outlook 2002 and Outlook 2003 – earlier versions of Outlook do not support the HTTP (WebDAV) protocol required for this to work. Exchange 2000 and Exchange 2003 both use WebDAV, so if you access an Exchange 2000/3 server with OWA, you can use you OWA URL to access your account in Outlook 2002/3.

Exchange 5.5 does not support WebDAV.

Hotmail and MSN are the only web email accounts at this time that support WebDAV, however, you need to have a paid account (MSN Subscription or Hotmail Plus) to use Outlook. You can’t use Outlook’s HTTP protocol to access mail at yahoo or with any other web mail service, at least not until they enable WebDAV.

Only HTTP is supported, HTTPS is not. If you cannot access your server using //owa.domain.com/exchange/user, you cannot use Outlook’s HTTP protocol.

Note: Some Outlook Express versions support HTTP protocol and everything that applies to Outlook in regards to using the HTTP protocol applies to those versions of OE.

Published March 21, 2005. Last reviewed on April 22, 2016.