How can I disable the Spell Checking option in OWA 2003?

OWA 2003 comes with a built-in spell checker that can help you spell check your outgoing mail in various languages:

  • English
  • French
  • German
  • Italian
  • Korean
  • Spanish

owa spell checker small
Service Pack 1 for Exchange Server 2003 adds even more language support, including the long-awaited Hebrew spell checking.
I’m not sure why you’d want to, but there is a way to prevent the spell checker to work.

  1. Open Regedit and navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\MSExchangeWeb\OWA
  1. Find or create a key called DisableSpellCheckOnSend with the type REG_DWORD.

If the value is set to 0x00000001 then users will not be able to select the option to automatically spell-check every e-mail that they send from OWA.
If the value is set to 0x00000000 then users will be able to select the option to automatically spell-check every e-mail that they send from OWA.
As with many of the OWA registry parameters, setting this parameter takes immediate effect; no service restarts required.

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