I am using Microsoft Outlook 2013 on my desktop to access my Gmail account. Every time (and I mean every time) I click on an email in Outlook, I get a small window saying, "Microsoft Outlook Contacting://www.google-analytics.com" and after 15 seconds or so, another window saying "Microsoft Outlook Contacting://www.googletagmanager.com" I don't recall ever installing an add-on or other software that would cause it to do this.
I can cancel to stop the contacting of these sites, but when I do, Outlook is unresponsive for at least another 30 seconds. As you can imagine, checking email has become a nightmare. I just want to shut this off somehow. And when I say it contacts these sites, I really have no idea what it is doing. It doesn't open a website in my browser or anything else that I can see.
I have since realized that the problem is specific to emails sent from BlueHost.com. The problem occurs when I choose to allow images to show in the email. I assume this is allowing some code to run that contacts Google Analytics for tracking purposes. Unfortunately, it just crashes Outlook.
How can I address this?
Best Answer
There is a solution to this, but try it only if you are OK with meddling with windows firewall. In the firewall advanced settings you can place rules as to which program has IN/OUT access to which port/protocol.
Now outlook fetches your mail using the IMap protocol, whereas the analytics site is accessed by your mail using http(s) protocols (ports 80 & 443).
So, you can achieve what you want by blocking access to outlook.exe on port 80 and 443. Of course, the downside of this is that you won't be able to access any web content on your mail, as web content requires http.(Though I'm sure you can specifically block analytics URL too. I don't remember how, I am currently on mobile)
UPDATE
You can block the program on HTTP(S) to a specific IP (as suggested by this answer: Blocking web sites with Windows Firewall).
The solution suggested by @Chipperyman is also good. By just making a small change in the hosts file, you can affect this change. In the linked answer you will find the details of how to use both methods.