In just the last few days, users have started experiencing some issues with Outlook when opening messages sent from PayPal.

This is happening with the recent versions of Outlook, including Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2007.

Some of the indications of the problem include.

• Outlook taking longer than normal to open.
• Outlook with “Reading Pane” on
• Outlook Stops Responding when clicking on an email from PayPal.
• If you wait a long time, it will come good, and even show the email message.
• If you are impatient and cancel out of outlook, your reading pane is gone when you next open it.

When loading Outlook you receive a message about and address: Contacting: \\102.112.207.net\b\ss\paypalglobal\1\G.4-NS

 

It appears that the cause of this is some malformed tracking cookies being sent from PayPal.

While it could be argued that Outlook should handle this invalid link much better than it does… We all know that Microsoft is responsible for Outlook, so really we should not expect too much in the way of “graceful error handling”. (After 20+ years of Windows system events, they still don’t have an online library of error codes and meanings.)

So what to do what to do?

First, I know for a fact that PayPal is aware of this issue, and while it is literally a 10 min fix for the right person, we know that finding the right person probably means contacting the dev team  and asking them to fix their crap!

Oh I have been doing this too long!

Really… what to do!

1. Nothing… If you are patient when opening email messages from PayPal while this issue happens, then they will open.
2. Delete all recent messages from PayPal permanently form both your inbox and deleted items.
3. Turn off the reading pane in Outlook.
4. Turn your Outlook into plain text preview

After PayPal fix the issue.

The invalid link when fixed will not fix messages already sent with the issue. So unless you permanently delete message with the problem, you will see the trouble each time outlook references them for reading. This is because the reference is totally invalid, not just temporarily down.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 13th, 2011 at 12:29 pm and is filed under Articles -- Webhosting, Email issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.