UPDATE: This is now fixed as YouTube have added the http:// to the SRC addresses now to stop Outlook thinking it’s a network path.
If you attempt to open and e-mail from YouTube recently in Outlook you’ll probably get what seems to be a lock-up and sometimes a complete Outlook crash. Most of the time it’s just timing out. Why is this happening? With the help of Process Monitor and some pointers from Mark Russinovich from Microsoft and creator of the great series of talks The Case Of The Unexplained it appears to be the way Outlook handles “//” tags.
While opening the e-mail Outlook, after a while frozen, would pop up the below message. Why was it trying to look at a network address \\ when ytimg.com is clearly a http address.
Running Process Monitor and putting some filters on it’s capture I found this:
As you can see Outlook is trying to look for a file at \\i3.ytimg.com\i\ and not finding it so timing out. Sending the findings to Mark Russinovich for his Case Of The Unexplained talks he replied, after I sent a copy of the e-mail so he was able to recreate it, that it’s the table in the e-mail that is trying to load the avatar’s people use:
<tr>
<td bgcolor=”#FFF” align=”left” width=”50″>
<img src=”//i3.ytimg.com/i/ZfOE9SPvPjlslcDGePkIiQ/1.jpg?
v=4fc532bd” height=”50″ width=”50″>
</td>
<td width=”16″></td>
Turns out Outlook is interpreting the “//” as a file server and attempting to find it, but obviously failing.
Only way around it at the moment is turning off HTML on all e-mails or just moving the file to a junk folder, which also turns off all html but just in that e-mail.
