Setting Outlook Web Access Views on the QueryString

The other day I received an e-mail from a guy who read an entry of mine on the Exchange team blog who wanted to know if was possible to specify the view of one's Inbox on the querystring. Surprised that people (one anyway) find my inane prattle useful, I thought I would share my response to him here in the hopes of helping someone else out. The answer is yes! You can specify the view as a querystring parameter and it looks something like this:

https://server/exchange/user/inbox/?cmd=contents&view=unread%20messages

“view“ is the name of the parameter and its value is the localized and url encoded (so %20 == space) name of the view you want to show, in this case “Unread Messages“.

Hope that helps someone else. Let me know if you find it useful.