Whenever I get a commercial email, such as a store ad or newsletter I have
signed up for, I get the following message when highlight the incoming email
to open or delete it:

Microsoft Office Outlook
Contacting the server for information

This hovers over the message for several seconds. I do have the option of
cancelling, but it takes just as long for it to cancel as it does to wait for
it to do whatever it does. It's aggravating when I have several emails that I
simply want to highlight and delete all at once, but instead I have to go
through them one by one and wait for some server to be contacted. So my
questions are:

What server is being contacted for what reason?

Is this as feature of Office/Outlook or is it my internet security software
(Kaspersky) scanning each item prior to opening?

Is there a way to get rid of this?

Thanks to whomever can answer my questions.