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A good question appeared in the Experts Exchange forum recently. Someone was asking how you could directly go to the OWA 2007 hard-deleted items page within the Options page (i.e. the one where you can recover messages from your Dumpster).

Sure, I answered. You just go to http://servername/owa/user@domain.com/?ae=options&t=DeletedItems . The OP went away to try it, but replied that the end got chopped of the URL when they tried it. Ah, I thought - they must have FBA enabled. FBA does that. You have to go direct to the FBA logon page URL, and you need to supply the final URL as an escaped parameter, like this:

https://servername/owa/auth/logon.aspx?url=https%3a%2f%2fservername%2fowa%2fuser@domain.com%2f%3fae=Options%26t=DeletedItems

In this form / is escaped to %2f, ? is escaped to %3f, and & is escaped to %26. Note also that the user@domain.com and servername parts must be replaced with your own valid values. I'm happy to say that it worked.