The Redmond giant has confirmed that users who don’t pay for a Microsoft 365 subscription will start seeing more advertising through the official Outlook app for iOS and Android. The issue came to light after a significant number of users saw that “native” ads look like emails if the Focused Inbox feature, which scans and filters incoming mail, is disabled. to highlight important correspondence.
The fact that the official Outlook mobile application shows advertising is far from new, however, it was only displayed in the “Other” section of the inbox. With Microsoft’s recent change, ads are now injected into the inboxes of all free (non-paying Microsoft 365) users who have disabled the Focused Inbox feature.
This modification in the Outlook application for Android and iOS has been confirmed by Microsoft itself with the following statement to The Verge: “For free users of Outlook, the ads are displayed in their inbox and they can opt out of enable the ‘Focused Inbox’ feature if they want to see ads only in the Other inbox”.
Microsoft has diversified its business model since the advent of Windows 10 to take an approach not unlike Google’s approach to Android and its services. The company responsible for Outlook has incorporated advertising into the operating system itself and is expanding it to all those who do not pay to use its services.
Outlook and Gmail showing ads through their apps is something we’ve learned to live with. If you don’t want to jump through hoops, your best bet is to use an independent email client with IMAP support that doesn’t include advertising. Here we can highlight K-9, an open source client that will be converted into Thunderbird for Android in the future.
Of course, it is important to bear in mind that the alternative email client may not show advertising through the application’s graphical interface, but that does not remove suspicions about the treatment that Microsoft and Google give to the emails that are hosted on their servers. . In extreme cases, it is preferable to resort to an email service that offers real privacy.
