If you have a Common Access Card (CAC) reader, it is possible to check your government email at home. I do this all of the time and it saves me a ton of time. Here is some information which was posted on Air Force Portal.
Office 365 Webmail
Published: Tue, Jan 1, 2019
Users with email/webmail issues should contact their local communications focal point (CFP) for assistance or submit a ticket in vESD.
Office 365 Webmail Links
- Internal – https://webmail.apps.mil/ or https://webmail.apps.mil/owa/usaf.mail.onmicrosoft.com
- External – https://owa.us.af.mil Please update your favorites with this new link. The previous link (https://cp.mail.us.af.mil) will not work after 15 Nov 2018.
Comments
- Internal means you are on your government computer on the Air Force Network (AFNet) whether on base or using the VPN.
- External means you are on a personal computer or a government computer not on the AFNet and not using the VPN.
- The Cloud Hosted Enterprise Services (CHES) team recommends any Office 365 webmail user review the CHES End User Guide and Outlook O365 Troubleshooting Guide.
- Link for reporting issues accessing Office 365 can be found in Air Force Portal post.
- For Office 365 users experiencing their webmail not loading after clicking on the DoD warning banner page, you may want to try running Internet Explorer in version 10 in emulation mode. To run emulation mode, hit the F12 key and then click on the emulation tab. Change the value in “User agent string” to “Internet Explorer 10”. Then hit the F12 key or the X in the top right corner of the F12 developer tools window to exit.
- Air Force Portal post link with more information.
John Valverde
What’s the external url?
airforceotsguy
External means trying to access it from a non .mil. that’s the one you’ll need if you are checking your government email from home
Thien Phan
that external link does not work. please advise.
airforceotsguy
Yeah they changed it to owa something. Give me a bit I’ll try to find it for you. When I tried it the other day it redirected me to the new one
SadeC.
Any luck with new external URL?
airforceotsguy
I fixed the post. Thank you guys for bugging me (seriously).
amanda
I tried the emulation trick and it’s still giving me errors. “DNS lookup error. The requested server does not exist.” Does that just mean that the site is down, or am I doing something wrong?
airforceotsguy
I just tried it and it worked. Are you using Internet Explorer? Did you try to clear cache and cookies and all of that good stuff?
KevinJ
Thank you very much for the info. I’ve had the old cp.mail.us.af.mil address and had trouble accessing my e-mails at home until now. The external owa.us.af.mil address works for me.
airforceotsguy
Thank AF Portal! I had the same frustration with the cp site until I found that post on Portal.
John
Is that the precise address? I know it’s listed as such but I can not access it. It times out or gives me a site credentials issue.
airforceotsguy
Yes it is but I just tried it again and it didn’t work for me. I’ll review all of the documentation the Air Force pushes out and see if anything has been updated. Honestly the DoD is really struggling with this right now. There are so many security requirements that our computers hardly even work anymore.
Noel
Thanks for the info on accessing webmail from external locations. I was able to access my email using the new link. Also, the comment for Office 365 did the trick.
airforceotsguy
Awesome, thanks for the comment!
Tyler Pullen
Still didn’t work for me. goes through the login process then says
NS – Site Unavailable
airforceotsguy
Are you using your email certificate?
Adrian
Did you get it fixed? mine does the same thing. Goes to the banner then I select my email certificate but still get the NS – Site Unavailable message
airforceotsguy
Yeah I’m not sure, try contacting your base CFP. Keep me posted.
Matt
Same issue here. Can’t reach this page after clicking the banner and entering pin. Tried every website suggestion on MilitaryCAC.com and associated links.
airforceotsguy
Yeah I’m not sure, try contacting your base CFP. It was working for me.
Airforcemail
I have been getting the NS-Site Unavailable message for about 3 weeks now. I have tried to troubleshoot it for many many hours with now luck. I have called my CFP twice spending over an hour total with them and they have no answers for me either. I do not have access to a DOD computer, so my computer is only way to access webmail. I have even tried someone else’s computer to see if it was just mine and I get same problem. Anyone find a legit answer that works to troubleshoot this issue? Thanks.
airforceotsguy
Do any of these tips help? It is working for me so I can’t duplicate the error you are seeing. Are you on mac or PC?
https://www.reddit.com/r/AirForce/comments/agflpn/webmail_question/
Edgar
My customer is also having the same issue “NS- Site Unavailable” https://owa.us.af.mil this is after enter his PIN and click on OK on the DoD warning banner
Chrome, Edge, IE 11 – Windows 10
I reset IE settings and Cache
airforceotsguy
Who is your customer, do you work for the CFP? A lot of people have been having this problem but I’m not sure how to fix it. I have tried on my computers and I haven’t been able to duplicate the problem.
Edgar
Customer: Aerospace
airforceotsguy
Yeah I’m not sure. It might be a firewall problem or something. You may have to work with your customer and/or the AF to figure out the problem. Is there a base nearby? You can email me at airforceotsguy@gmail.com
TJ
Great info! Has anyone gotten S/MIME to work from an external connection? I’m using Firefox.
airforceotsguy
Hey I just tried it and it was hit or miss for me. Are you still having trouble?
Rand Haas
How come the “https://owa.us.af.mil” webmail link in lined-out on this page?
airforceotsguy
It’s because when my link checker checks the link it thinks it’s broken so it lines it out. I keep telling it to ignore it but it always reverts for some reason. I’ll check it out later.
Are you aware of the virtual desktop with VMware Horizon that we can use to actually remote in to include share drive access? It sometime works better than webmail but both are pretty bogged down right now
Fernande Sampson
I’m unable to access my external OWA. I’m telework due to COVID-19 I need access to my email account.
I received the error message once I passed the DOD Banner
Error…
If you are trying to access an internal DoD website through the external OWA portal, it is intentionally disabled. If you are trying to access an external website through the external OWA portal, please use a new browser window.
Otherwise, an error occurred while processing your request. Please try your request again. If the problem continues, try restarting your browser. For assistance with this error, please contact your local CFP or submit a trouble ticket in vESD and provide the error information below:
Epoch: 1585087203
Request ID: d5797
Request Path: /f5-w-68747470733a2f2f7765626d61696c2e617070732e6d696c$$/owa/us.af.mil
Status Code: 504
Client IP: 68.1.42.238
Edge IP: 214.48.247.23
Stack ID: 3
Reference ID: 1.17f730d6.1585087203.d5797
airforceotsguy
If you go on portal some have had success with using the VPN client VMWare Horizon. However, since the entire AF is trying to telework right now I think all of the servers for all options are over-loaded.
William
This link does not work any longer.
airforceotsguy
The entire AF is trying to use webmail right now so I think the servers are overloaded. Keep trying, otherwise there is also a VPN option that some have had success with.
Mark
Has anyone successfully used virtual desktop with VMware Horizon, that is not AFRC? Not sure if the Active Duty side has been able to successfully utilize this. from the few images I’ve seen, this would be great if it is able to be used by the AD force.
airforceotsguy
Yes it works well when it works, but the servers and infrastructure was designed for the reserve side so it is heavily bogged down right now