TRICK-NEVER-MISSING COMPANY Microsoft appears to be having a second staff of infecting built-in Windows 10 apps with adverts.

You might remember that this time last year, we started seeing adverts (mostly for other Microsoft products) in the native Mail and Calendar UWP apps for Windows 10. At the time Microsoft passed it off as just “an experiment” and duly, they disappeared soon after Chrimbletide.

However, a report from MSPowerUser this weekend suggests they’re back with a vengeance and worse than before.

That’s because, during the experiment, you weren’t served the adverts if your Microsoft account was registered with an Office 365 subscription (ho-hum, what a surprise). This time, however, it seems that isn’t enough to get you off the hook.

That said, why an Office 365 subscriber would use Mail and Calendar over Outlook is a head-scratcher, though maybe, in Redmondland, that’s the point.

The big kicker is that any illusion of ‘accident’ disappears when you realise that the adverts are contextual. Add a Yahoo! Mail account, get an advert for reading Yahoo! Mail on mobile with Outlook (incidentally, a sentence that early nineties man would have no way of understanding). Look at Google Calendar via the app and… well, you get the idea.

Worse still, the adverts don’t scale properly if you access Outlook via a mobile app. In some cases, you can end up with an advert telling you how you can look at your emails, on your phone, whilst the app becomes unusable because there’s a ruddy great advert across the navigation – telling you to use the app you’re trying to use.

Microsoft has pretty much confirmed that the ads are here to say, explaining ominously: “The ads within the app itself will be displayed regardless of which email address you use it with. It is not removable, but you can submit it as a suggestion within the Feedback Hub on Windows 10”

At least that suggests it could be another ‘experiment’ – but let’s assume not and make sure it gets nipped in the bud before its normalised, eh? μ

Source: https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3084701/microsoft-ads-windows-10-mail-calendar