Outlook Hangs on Emails with Invalid Network Paths – Fixing Guide

emailemail-clientmicrosoft-outlookmicrosoft-outlook-2010

At first I thought this could be an isolated problem, but several email from different sources are presenting the same problem. Whenever the email contains an (AFAIK malformed) youtube thumbnail URI, outlook 2010 (14.0.6112.5000 x64) hangs with this dialog on the foreground

The offending source code is

<img alt=3D"" border=3D"0" src=3D"//img.youtube.com/vi/7H_Xe2=5Ub0k/hqdefault.jpg" style=3D"display: block; border: 0;" width=3D"200">

Interestingly enough, this image displays fine when viewed via webmail (google apps).

Shouldn't out look treat this link just like any other broken link and not hang ?
Why does the URI work on webmail but not for outlook?
Any suggestions on a temporary workaround?

Best Answer

One "solution" is to edit your hosts file to map img.youtube.com to your local IP address (127.0.0.1) so it fails instantly, rather than taking 1 minute to fail to find \img.youtube.com.

In my case the emails had an image attempting to load from //feeds.feedburner.com blocking that network location is rather severe though if you run an RSS reader.

Related Solutions

Outlook freezing with emails that have links without http protocol block

I've had problems with links like this in Outlook when Internet Explorer is not the default browser. In my case the user had Chrome as the default browser and Outlook was hanging handing over the link to Chrome - it did eventually load the image, but it would take literally 5 minutes of being non-responsive.

Anyway, I would have thought that you really should be specifying the protocol in the hyperlink as best practice, but I'm not sure it will make much difference in this case

Outlook only sending emails from home network

Public locations might well block Port 25 (the default SMTP port) to stop people abusing their network. If you're using an ISP email server it could well block SMTP requests from outside it's IP range.

Two things to try:

Try using a public SMTP server like Yahoo. SMTP doesn't dictate which server an email needs to be sent from, ie you can send a me@mydomain.com from a Yahoo SMTP server.
Try using Port 587 instead of 25 for your SMTP connection. It's a common alternate port for SMTP.

To test out the connection to an SMTP server from the command line you can use telnet:

telnet smtp.mail.yahoo.com 25

Hopefully you'll see something like this:

C:\>telnet smtp.mail.yahoo.com 25
Connecting To smtp.mail.yahoo.com...

220 smtp123.mail.ird.yahoo.com ESMTP

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Outlook freezing with emails that have links without http protocol block

Outlook only sending emails from home network

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