
#Lag in typing outlook email 2017 full#
One thing to note though: users who followed a full cloud model, using the web browser rather than desktop Outlook, were not impacted at all.
#Lag in typing outlook email 2017 update#
One is that Outlook, despite its high value in integrating email, calendar, contacts and tasks, remains full of legacy code that can cause problems.Īnother is that today's Windows and Office 365 users are one bad update away from hours of lost productivity. Some of the less appealing aspects of Microsoft's platform were exposed by this bug. That said, even breaking Web Layout in Word is something that should have been spotted – though combining rapid response to security problems with thorough testing of updates for unexpected side-effects is a challenge. In Outlook though, "web Layout is the default and only view available." Other views, such as Page View and Reading View, were not impacted." In the report, the company noted that for Word, "the default view is not Web View, so only a small percentage of users use it. We can speculate though that some small corner of Microsoft did not take account of the key role Word Web Layout plays in Outlook. Microsoft said that it is "performing an extensive review of our coding to understand how the issue occurred and why it was missed during the testing and early deployment cycle," and there may be a further update to follow on this matter, when the preliminary report is replaced with a final one. Microsoft has not revealed the exact detail of what setting was responsible, nor has it yet said what was the problem in Word that it fixed. Windows just did some background stuff and bam, Outlook breaks then bam, Outlook is fixed. That four-hourly call home presumably explains why Microsoft was able both to introduce and to fix the issue with so little sign, from a user perspective, that anything was changing. Configurations can be synchronized up to every four hours by Microsoft 365 apps," the company said.

We can target these rollouts to specific builds, apps, platforms, or audiences.

A configuration, in this context, is something "which Microsoft 365 apps use to determine which features, components, or specific code paths are enabled or disabled. Microsoft's impact report is far from comprehensive, but there are clues about what happened. This interaction turned from annoyance to disaster in the faulty configuration that gave rise to EX255650. For those who wonder why Outlook makes it so hard to format emails sensibly when doing things like quoting parts of an email received in the reply and typing in-line comments, or putting the background of the incoming email behind the reply: it is the interaction with Word that is to blame. The same is true for authoring emails: Word is wheeled in, though with some strange Outlook-specific behaviour. In Outlook 2007, embedded IE was replaced by embedded Word, using Word's HTML support, upsetting authors of marketing emails who had to tailor their content to suit those limited capabilities, but making Outlook significantly more secure. It has led to problems like CVE-2002-0481, "an interaction between Windows Media Player (WMP) and Outlook 2002 allows remote attackers to bypass Outlook security settings and execute JavaScript via an IFRAME in an HTML email message." If that sounds like a recipe for security issues, that's because it was.

The reasons go back to the days of Outlook 2003 and earlier, where HTML email content was rendered by embedded Internet Explorer. Word's Web Layout view is little used, and users are only likely to encounter it if they open an HTML document in Word, or foolishly attempt to author web content there and save as HTML. The only things that typically worked was rolling back the last Office update, or running Outlook in safe mode.

Attempts to create or reply to an email allowed a line of text to be typed, but when the user pressed enter, the text disappeared.Īdmins steeped in the strange ways of Office and Windows tried the usual range of fixes, rebooting PCs, reinstalling Office, poking through the event viewer, digging deep into Outlook options to disable hardware graphics acceleration, but generally without success. It was on the evening of May 11th, UK time, and in the middle of the working day in North America (18:24 UTC, 19:24 BST, 11:24 Pacific), that many Office 365 customers using Outlook on Windows observed a frustrating problem: blank emails (or maybe showing just one line), even though a few lines of the email could be previewed in the list of messages. Microsoft has published a Preliminary Post Incident Report on last week's events which broke Outlook on Windows for millions of users, making emails impossible to view or create.
