Microsoft wants to insert ads into Windows email and tests them already (update)



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Do you use the default email client on your PC, the one supplied with Windows 10, to read your email? What would you say if Microsoft decided to place some ads at the top of your inbox?

These questions are not rhetorical – as a Windows news site Aggiornamenti Lumia noticed today, Microsoft is already testing this exact idea in a number of countries around the world. According to the Microsoft FAQ, this is a pilot program, an experiment, a test that, in theory, will help the company decide if it should actually deploy the feature.

Updated, 11:52 PT: Frank Shaw, Head of Communication at Microsoft tell us the company has decided to disable these ads. He also stated that the experiment was never designed to be tested on a large scale, which does not support the existence of a FAQ for a pilot program in several countries around the world, but the announcements should disappear.

The original article continues:

But it's rather unusual for a simple A / B test to have a plan as well thought out to get your money: if you want to unsubscribe, Microsoft says it will only cost you $ 7 a month ($ 70 a year) for an Office 365 Personal subscription.

Let's take Microsoft word for it to be a pilot program, but it could disappear as quickly as it happened, as does my colleague Tom Warren below. If that's the case, now This is precisely your chance to give Microsoft valuable feedback – maybe how do you want ads in a program that you have (probably) already bought and paid for?

(Personally, I had Windows 10 free when upgrading from Windows 7 – but generally, when you buy or build a new Windows PC, part of the cost goes to a copy of Windows.)

As for the benefits, Microsoft says it will not read the content of your email or calendar when it targets you with these ads, unlike Yahoo and AOL. (Google has stopped analyzing e-mail content for ads targeting in 2017.) But Microsoft will try to target the ads.

And this is not the only hostile land grab by users we've seen recently at Microsoft's trial. In September, Microsoft halted a short-sighted attempt to deter users of the Google Chrome web browser and attempted to mix email users with its Microsoft Edge browser every time they clicked on a link in March.

Based on a few reports from Twitter users, Microsoft may have been testing these ads for months – both versions are from July:

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