Microsoft makes it harder for users to avoid ads in Outlook mobile apps

According to The Vergethe Outlook mobile app gives users two options for organizing their inbox: a single inbox with everything in it or a tabbed inbox split into two categories, ‘focused’ with important mail and ‘Other’ with all the rest.

Previously, Microsoft had only put ads in the ‘Other’ tab for free users, but it’s now adding them to the single-inbox mode, too.

The change has been rolling out over the past few months and essentially means Microsoft is making it harder for free users to avoid ads in Outlook mobile.

Confirming the change, Microsoft’s spokesperson Caitlin Roulston confirmed The Verge saying, “For free users of Outlook, ads are shown in their inbox and they can choose to enable the ‘Focused inbox’ feature if they would like to see ads only in the ‘Other ‘ inbox.”

As per the report, whatever inbox mode you use, there’ll be ads somewhere in the mix, either at the top of your Other tab or the top of your regular inbox.

To avoid the ads in Outlook mobile, users will have to pay for a Microsoft 365 subscription.

The ads appear at the top of an inbox and look confusingly like real emails, similar to how both Microsoft and Google display ads inside the web versions of Outlook and Gmail.

As per The Verge, users can swipe to delete the email-like ads, but they’ll soon reappear, and opening one will display advertising content within an in-app browser.

(With inputs from ANI)

First article