You Receive "The Page Cannot be Displayed" Result When You Click a URL in an E-Mail Message

If you copy a URL from an e-mail message, and then paste it in an e-mail message that you send, the recipient may experience one of the following behaviors when they click the hyperlink in the message:

• They are prompted for their credentials to log on to Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA). After they enter their credentials, the target Web page is displayed.
• They receive the following Web page:

  The page cannot be displayed

  The page you are looking for is currently unavailable. The Web site might be experiencing technical difficulties, or you may need to adjust your browser settings.

This issue occurs because when you paste the URL from an e-mail message in OWA to another e-mail message, the hyperlink includes the Exchange redirector portion in the href attribute (instead of just the URL to the Web site). The Web page cannot be displayed because the recipient's e-mail program cannot interpret the Exchange redirector portion of the hyperlink.

This issue occurs if both of the following conditions are true:

• You paste the URL in an e-mail message in OWA, and then send the message to a recipient.
• The recipient does not use OWA to open the e-mail message.

To work around this issue, use the following method that is appropriate for your situation.

Method 1: When You Send a Message

When you paste a URL in a message that you send to a non-OWA recipient, edit the hyperlink to remove the Exchange redirector portion from the hyperlink:

1. Select the hyperlink, and then press CTRL+L.
2. In the URL box, type the URL that you want to include in the e-mail message, and then click OK.

Method 2: When You Receive a Message

If you receive a "Page cannot be displayed" result when you click a URL in an e-mail message, select and then delete the portion of the URL that appears before http://Web site name from the Address bar in your Web browser, and then click Go.

If you are prompted for credentials when you click a hyperlink to an external Web site, follow these steps:

1. In Internet Services Manager, view the properties of the "Exchweb" virtual directory.
2. On the Directory Security tab, click the Edit button under anonymous access and authentication control.
3. Click to select the Basic Authentication check box, include the default domain name, and then click OK.
4. When prompted to select which "child nodes" to include, click the bin node.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in Microsoft Exchange Server 2003.

When you paste the URL from a message in OWA to another message, the URL includes the Exchange redirector portion of the href attribute instead of just the URL. For example, if you:

1. Open a message in OWA that contains the URL http://www.microsoft.com
2. Right-click the URL, and then click Copy Shortcut
3. Create a new message and then paste the URL in the new message

the following path appears in the new message: where servername is the name of the Exchange Server 2003 computer, and example.com is the name of your domain.

When you send this e-mail message to a recipient, and that recipient clicks the URL in the message, one of the following behaviors occurs:

• If the recipient uses OWA to open the message, they are directed to the Web site that is specified in the URL (in this example, www.microsoft.com).
• If the recipient uses a MAPI client such as Microsoft Outlook to open the message, and the recipient has access to OWA, they are prompted for their credentials to log on to OWA. When they enter their credentials, they are directed to the Web site that is specified in the URL (in this example, www.microsoft.com).
• If the recipient uses a MAPI client such as Microsoft Outlook to open the message, and the recipient does not have access to OWA, or if the recipient is from a different domain where they cannot access your OWA server, they are not directed to the Web site, and they receive the error page that is described in the "Symptoms" section of this article.

If you right-click the hyperlink in Outlook, and then click View Source, the href attribute appears similar to: