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Every time I click on a Stack Exchange newsletter mail item

item in Inbox

my Outlook hangs for several minutes.

process bar

I am using Windows 7 64-bit and Outlook 2013 64-bit: Microsoft Outlook version description

The preview of the e-mail is enough to trigger the crash. I did not double click on the e-mail to open it in a popup.

After waiting for several minutes it seems that several images have not been loaded.

screen shot with missing images

Could it be that the service provided by i.stack.imgur.com takes a long time to answer the requests from Outlook?

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  • For the record, Thunderbird does not have any such problem. Can you get a Wireshark capture and tell us what the HTTP traffic looks like? At the moment this is something of a vague question that can probably not be answered at the level of detail given. – Lightness Races in Orbit Mar 6 '15 at 21:01
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    It's because they're protocol-relative URLs. Outlook doesn't handle that very well, it interprets them as file://. – Stijn Mar 6 '15 at 21:03
  • @Stijn, because of this problem I consider to unsubscribe and probably other outlook users will also do this. Since it is not easy to realize a change within outlook, is it possible to realize a change to how to the stack exchange newsletter is setup. – Ruut Mar 9 '15 at 9:30
  • @Ruut sure it's possible. But I have the feeling you confuse me for a dev, I'm just a user like you :) – Stijn Mar 9 '15 at 10:14
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If that popup is to be believed, somebody screwed up and used UNC/SMB paths in the newsletter (\\i.stack.imgur.com). SMB traffic is dropped by most ISPs and corporate firewalls due to security concerns (including use by worms/viruses like Blaster) - hence the timeout.

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  • Actually, it's MS screwing up by the numbers mis-interpreting the email. – Deduplicator Mar 7 '15 at 22:53

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