Outlook Crashes from Youtube and Google Drive emails

Even though I seem to be the only CS major outside of industry who uses Outlook, I feel like I have to say something about a ridiculous bug related to the fact that Microsoft and Google don't know how to share their toys.

Now, Outlook is an industry standard application. It supports all the standard email formats, and it's got a bundle of cool features besides that. It's more than just an email client. I essentially use it to manage my life, calendar, and contacts.

Google has apparently decided that standard email formats aren't good enough and is now sending emails through its services (Google Docs and YouTube are the ones I've encountered so far) which do something "special." The emails work just fine in web browsers but when opened in Outlook some script or something related to fetching a user's Google avatar causes Outlook to crash.

These videos show the problem and a simple fix:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNG2_9yKCPM&list=UU7oZuYX69n34VFHgctJWQPA&index=2&feature=plcp
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCWcOOBihvY

If you use Google Docs / Google Drive, you'll also have to add docs.google.com to your block list.

I would think that there should be a way you can set up a rule to move these emails to a folder and then set  that folder to display emails in plain text, the way the Junk email folder does, because I don't actually want these emails to be Junk, but this is the only workable solution I have found for now, since it is an incredible waste of my time for my email to crash every so often when I get a new email from one of these services and "open" it by switching to my email tab in Outlook, and finding that the preview pane has tried to display my most recent email, and Outlook has now crashed.

I'm not sure we can expect a patch from Microsoft because they're busy with the next iteration of Office and until this looks like a security hole, it won't be high priority. Google, on the other hand, can cut out the fancy crap and send me the emails I want without all the nonsense scripting garbage.