# Outlook freezes constantly apparently since YouTube updated their message format



## aab1 (Apr 1, 2008)

I noticed YouTube messages, at least those notifying of comments on videos, have been dramatically redesigned.

Unless it's pure coincidence, ever since that change my Outlook 2003 or 2007 or whatever it is (I can check when it unfreezes) freezes apparently every time a YouTube message is loaded in the preview pane.

Am I the only one to have this problem and how can I fix it?

I believe this Outlook bug occurs if an email has photo for which the source cannot be found on the internet, so I tried removing youtube from my safe senders so it wouldn't try to load broken images but it still freezes.

It's hard to tell if only YouTube messages cause the problem as I got a boatload of them so all messages visible on screen are from YouTube and I need to wait for outlook to freeze for several minutes for each message I delete before it unfreezes again.

Thanks for any help with this infuriating problem.


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## aab1 (Apr 1, 2008)

My theory is confirmed, I was actually able to "shift+ down arrow" multi select the YouTube emails with only 1 or 2 freezes per batch and after several painstaking batches and freezes I managed to delete all those new YouTube emails and it proved my theory, they are the problem, no more freezes whatsoever with that YouTube garbage deleted.

I guess I just need to ban youtube emails entirely until they fix the bug, or is there a proper fix? Why didn't removing them from my safe senders list fix it? Does Outlook need to be restarted for this to take affect?

Thank you


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## fdasfdsa2343 (Sep 20, 2012)

Hey, I signed up for this forum because I am having the EXACT same issue. Very annoying. Whatever youtube did to their emails to notify you of comments, etc. from my youtube channel just locks up outlook for about 2-3 minutes and then it unfreezes. Very frustrating.

Windows 7 64-bit
Outlook 2010

Someone started a youtube thread about it. Maybe YT will actually fix it...

Google Groups


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## Nylanox (Sep 22, 2012)

I have the exact same issue!!!

It is the most annoying thing ever, I have 1 unread message that wont clear up!

If anyone has a solution for this please let me know.

Thanks,

-Nylanox


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## aab1 (Apr 1, 2008)

If you right click and select delete it won't freeze if it isn't already selected. You can also use ctrl or shift with the up and down arrows and spacebar to select all YouTube messages and delete them at once, that's what I did and then set YouTube not to email me about comments.

Don't expect them to fix this any time soon, bugs in Google Chrome's browsers are left there for up to a year or more before they eventually correct them, I wouldn't be surprised if this only gets fixed in 2014, maybe in 2013.


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## dazzletag (Sep 22, 2012)

Same here - So annoying. Is there a way to only download text versions rather than HTML emails?


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## irontechmonkey (Sep 11, 2012)

Been seeing the same thing in Outlook 2k7 on Vista ult 64. Some old tricks for avoiding message formatting related issues might workaround problem although these workarounds should not be required. - Before running Outlook check mail by web interface and get rid of problematic messages.... but then why have Outlook at all! - Run Outlook without the preview pane - Set outlook to display messages as text only. Gotta wonder what Google is doing with youtube as they are showing signs of both improving it and killing it. Thanks for the tip about just waiting a few minutes then right click delete as that let me get rid of one of theme messages with the preview pane on.


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## nathanjbaker (Sep 23, 2012)

This is happening to me, too. I'm glad others posted about it to confirm the problem. 

YouTube changed its messages a few days ago, and this is causing the problem. Outlook has a hard time displaying the message. When I interrupt the freezing and manually shut down Outlook and then restart, the reading pane is now turned off in Outlook. When I let the freeze play itself out, it takes one to two minutes for the message to display.

BTW, I thought this might be a preview/reading pane issue, but the freeze also happens when trying to click on a YouTube message when the reading pane and auto-preview are both turned off.

Google has been ruining YouTube for the past year or so. And the fact that they have no customer service only adds insult to injury.


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## irontechmonkey (Sep 11, 2012)

nathanjbaker said:


> ....BTW, I thought this might be a preview/reading pane issue, but the freeze also happens when trying to click on a YouTube message when the reading pane and auto-preview are both turned off.....


Thanks for that info... so this could mean the problem is at the level of outlook managing the message at all (parsing it out of the larger message store file?) rather than just a display issue.


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## redmist77 (Sep 24, 2012)

I'm having this problem too. It's very frustrating.

Surely this is an Outlook issue since it shouldn't matter what YouTube put in their emails - it shouldn't freeze an email program.


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## LE55ONS (Sep 24, 2012)

*Problem found...*

The e-mails I have been receiving lately from YouTube regarding replies to my comments have been causing my e-mail reader, Microsoft Outlook, to freeze up for several minutes.
The probable cause was identified when it occasionally showed a popup window indicating, "Loading \\i3.ytimg.com\i\v4SO0_fBNZx7eoxcH2tkBQ". This resource reference is clearly being interpreted by Microsoft Outlook as a Microsoft Windows UNC path, due to the backslashes. Hence, the e-mail client is most likely scanning the LAN for the LAN resource on the Windows file sharing protocol, rather than HTTP. If the resource used forward slashes instead of backslashes, i.e. "//i3.ytimg.com/i/v4SO0_fBNZx7eoxcH2tkBQ", this would resolve cleanly because URI behavior in an HTML document is to default the protocol to "http:". If the resource reference was preceded with "http:", i.e. "http:\\i3.ytimg.com\i\v4SO0_fBNZx7eoxcH2tkBQ", the DOM renderer would probably have defaulted its behavior to convert the backslashes to forward slashes; however, in a corporate environment, it could be normal practice to included LAN UNC paths as image resources in an HTML-formated e-mail.

I hope YouTube is monitoring this and can forward this matter to the appropriate developer resource or else provide a proper issue tracking system URL.

(Copied from Google Groups)


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## redmist77 (Sep 24, 2012)

OK, I take it back. This is a YouTube problem, not an Outlook problem.

Nice work.


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## stimpy77 (Sep 25, 2012)

Yes it's YouTube. Cause and issue posted here: Google Groups

LE55ONS's referenced post was mine.


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## JJJMMM1 (Sep 25, 2012)

redmist77 said:


> OK, I take it back. This is a YouTube problem, not an Outlook problem.


How is it not an Outlook problem? If you can send someone an email which immediately freezes the program upon opening, it is very much an Outlook problem. I'm not saying Youtube didn't cause the crash, I'm saying Outlook shoudn't crash itself because of the contents of an email.


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## irontechmonkey (Sep 11, 2012)

Which came first? The chicken or the egg?


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## irontechmonkey (Sep 11, 2012)

JJJMMM1 said:


> How is it not an Outlook problem? If you can send someone an email which immediately freezes the program upon opening, it is very much an Outlook problem. I'm not saying Youtube didn't cause the crash, I'm saying Outlook shoudn't crash itself because of the contents of an email.


Could this be part of an old war between open source (Firefox, Google, etc) and proprietary (Microsoft)? Microsoft has traditionally been the baddie in these exchanges but Facebook and more recently Google have set new highs, that is to say lows, in the foisting of proprietary software and forcing of "membership". This may just be Google's fault - it happened after they made changes to youtube.


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## stimpy77 (Sep 25, 2012)

JJJMMM1 said:


> How is it not an Outlook problem? If you can send someone an email which immediately freezes the program upon opening, it is very much an Outlook problem. I'm not saying Youtube didn't cause the crash, I'm saying Outlook shoudn't crash itself because of the contents of an email.


It's not crashing, it's timing out looking for a UNC resource, due to a UNC support feature that Outlook enjoys and other email clients don't have. However, it's definitely a problem that such a network fetch would be performed on the UI thread. And Microsoft did fix this in Outlook 2013, or so they say.


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## gulfsprite (Sep 26, 2012)

If you take your system offline {I turn off my connection to wifi} your Outlook unfreezes. I just reduced my email from YT to pretty much comments only. I get a lot of them though so I may end up just shutting off all YT emails soon!


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## stimpy77 (Sep 25, 2012)

gulfsprite said:


> If you take your system offline {I turn off my connection to wifi} your Outlook unfreezes. I just reduced my email from YT to pretty much comments only. I get a lot of them though so I may end up just shutting off all YT emails soon!


Actually, I tried that first, disconnecting from wifi. Glad it worked for you but it didn't work for me, still froze for minutes.


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## stimpy77 (Sep 25, 2012)

stimpy77 said:


> gulfsprite said:
> 
> 
> > If you take your system offline {I turn off my connection to wifi} your Outlook unfreezes. I just reduced my email from YT to pretty much comments only. I get a lot of them though so I may end up just shutting off all YT emails soon!
> ...


Also, if you're disconnected you can't fetch POP3 mail and can't sync to an IMAP server.


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## gulfsprite (Sep 26, 2012)

Sorry it isn't working for you  I first download everything. Then disconnect my wifi connection. Read/ delete all YT email. Then reconnect my wifi. Half the time I do forget to reconnect and am on the edge of just shutting off all YT emails until this gets fixed.


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## Outlier (Mar 5, 2007)

The exact same thing is happening to me. I'm sure it's just the YouTube emails - I created a rule for Outlook that sends all YouTube emails to a specific folder. It is only that folder that is experiencing these delay issues you've all been discussing.

Even if Outlook doesn't download the images of these emails, the delay still occurs. I even tried adding ytimg.com to the Windows hosts file and I thought that would've solved it but the delay still occurs and Outlook even gives a message that it's looking for that url (I'm using Outlook 2010). 

Here's a quick workaround for people who might want to read their YouTube emails first before deciding whether to delete or keep them. Create an Outlook rule that sends emails sent from YouTube to the Junk E-mail folder. Once in the Junk folder, there will be no loading delay issues and you'll be able to read the text right away (since all functionality of the email is taken away once it's in the Junk folder). After reading the text, you can either move it back to your Inbox (or better yet, create a folder specifically for YouTube and move it there) or you can just delete the email right there. This could be used as a temporary fix until YouTube corrects the problem (which hopefully can be counted in days, not years)


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## BrrZ (Sep 27, 2012)

Hi, just adding my 2 cents. I've been experiencing the Youtube email freezing problem for days. Finally found a video with the solution for any version of Outlook. I'm a bit afraid to post the link as I'm not sure what constitutes spam here, but it's easy enough to find. GL.

Edit: Note - it's simpler than the solution above, but do whatever works eh?


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