HTML links in Outlook (office) 2016 taking a long time to open.

Clean install of Windows 10 Pro, 1709, 16299.98. And fresh install of Office 2016. Ran Windows update with give me updates for other Microsoft products checked. This the full office 20160 Pro Plus, not office 365. If I click a link in an e-mail, like the ones for forum post notifications, there is a really long delay before they open in IE. Same thing happens if I set edge as default. First time this has ever happened to me. When I click the link I see blue activity balls scroll across the top of the e-mail, then about 30 seconds latter the link opens in IE. It was almost instantaneous in the past. I did a Google search but didn't find anything current of anything that helped.

Hi alphanumeric.

I had a friend who started getting a lot of strange links in his email and of course it was provided to me to fix.

From what I can tell, and this may not be your issue, MS is rolling out Safelink. It seems that when you click on a link in their premier mail products, that link is interrogated for baddies and is then opened for you.

I would google Safelink Outlook. I did not find a solution and this may not be your issue but it sounds like what could be happening.


Ken

That appears to apply to Outlook in Office 365, Outlook.com and exchange. My links don't look to be altered. Not sure what's going on. It's really annoying and frustrating though.

Since you can control which sites you click and can just try this on Tenforums... have you tried disabling all AV's on your system. Just for a TenForums test.

Yes, that was one of the first things I tried, it was my prime suspect. App & browser control is all set to Warn, as is Smart Screen. I turned it all off anyway along with real Time Protection and it didn't help.

Just did a clean install of 10 Pro on my laptop, same install media I used on my desktop PC. Then installed Office from an ISO already on its Data drive and outlook is working fine. Same ISO (version) I used on my desktop PC. I guess it's time to copy that ISO over or download a new one from MSDN? Then uninstall and reinstall office?

Nice. How much is that MSDN license?

It's a free perk of being a Microsoft MVP. We get a free, download only no media supplied, subscription. It stays active as long as we get renewed as an MVP.

Cool.

I keep calling MSDN but its now Visual Studio Subscriptions. It's a nice perk, I can download pretty well any Microsoft software except games. And get the product codes to install and activate it. Just about to go and reinstall office on my desktop, I'm typing this from my laptop.