Webmail saying "Access Denied"

Where are the emails saved to, if it is not the wwwroot folder then they do not have permissions to perform the activities you mention. Or perhaps they have not authenticated?

harbor235

Authentication is required. I don't know where the default location is for the emails.

Webmail provided by what server?  Are you talking Outlook Web Access (provided by Exchange)?

Yes, it is Exchange Outlook Web Access.

I have checked permissions on everything I can think of:  Folders, DNS, Exchange System manager.  It has got to be some kind of permissions problem.

If I try to delete a message from Outlook Web Access, I get: "Some Items can't be deleted. They were either moved, already deleted, or access was denied."

If I try to move a message to another folder, I get: "Access Denied."

This wroked last week and I don't know what has changed.  Does anybody know what could have caused this or how to fix it.

Have you tried restarting the server?  Always worth a shot with Exchange... it tends to suddenly develop quirks like this in my experience...

All the permissions for doing things like this in web-access are taken from the standard Exchange mailboxes, so it is in Exchange (or Active Directory) that these permissions need to be checked.  Having said this, if it was working last week, and now isn't, it is unlikely to be permissions.  Are there any errors in the Application Event Log with reference to Exchange?

I'm not seeing any Exchange errors in the App log.  This is a very strange problem.  Everything else is working great.  I'll try restarting the server in the morning, but any other suggestions in the meantime would be greatly appreciated.

On IIS, make sure you have Integrated Windows Authentication checked for the "Exchange" and "ExchWeb" directories along with Anonymous access and Send passwords in clear text "popup window".  Make "Exchadmin" Integrated Windows Authentication

The server reboot did not help.  Still the same problem.

Windows authentication is being used for those folders.  The users are not having any problem logging into Webmail.  They can even view all of their messages.  They just can't delete or move messages.

Does the same problem occur if you try and move or delete items from Outlook?

I broke down and called Microsoft about this.

In IIS, we deleted the following folders from the Default Website:

Exchange
Exchweb
Microsoft Server Active Synch
OMA
Public

Then, from a command prompt:

cd\inetpub\adminscripts
adsutil
adsutil delete ds2mb
exit

Then in Services, restart Microsoft Exchange System Attendant

As I understood it, the adsutil utility and ds2mb replicates information betwee Exchange and IIS.  After deleting the folders listed above, running the adsutil utility, and restarting the Sytem Attendant service, all of the deleted folders were back in IIS and everything was working beautifully.

That is a very useful fix, thanks very much for posting it back.

To give clarification of what this fix does:

adsutil - this ensures that the default scripting language is cscript.  If it isn't (it needs to be), you are prompted to change this.
adsutil delete ds2mb - this deletes the ds2mb path (from \inetpub\adminscripts in this case)

It is then restarting the System Attendant that re-creates virtual directories in IIS.

This looks like a very useful way of completely clearing and resetting OWA - I shall make a note of it!!