Microsoft starts placing top ads in the new version of Outlook. If you want to completely turn off the ads, it will cost $1.99/month.

In June last year, Microsoft announced that it would abandon the UWP mail and calendar applications. At the same time, Microsoft launched a new version of Outlook based on WebView2. At present, Microsoft has also begun to push the new version of Outlook to users on a large scale. Regardless of whether the user is using the UWP version of email or the Win32 version of the Outlook desktop program, a new version of Outlook may be automatically pushed and installed.

The new version of Outlook is still available for free, but third-party top ads have begun to appear in it. This is completely different from Microsoft's previous only Microsoft 365 subscription ads in the UWP version.

According to news released by German technology website GHacks, Microsoft is running native ads in the new version of Outlook. The so-called native ads refer to ads whose advertising styles are very similar to emails.

For example, the advertisement in the picture below has "Sender", "Subject", and "Email Content", and Ad is marked in the upper right corner to indicate that it is an advertisement. If the user clicks directly without looking carefully, he will find that this is not a new email but an advertisement.

This kind of native advertising is not from Microsoft 365, but is an advertisement placed by Microsoft and nearly a thousand partners, including advertising networks. Of course, user information is inevitably collected here.

According to EU law, Microsoft has previously disclosed data collection and advertising information of the new version of Outlook to users in the EU market. The information shows that Microsoft and its 772 partners (including advertising networks) use PCs running the new version of Outlook to identify users, store and/or access information on the PC, provide personalized ads and other content, and obtain "audience insights" in other ways.

The advertisements in the new version of Outlook cannot be turned off permanently. You can delete the advertisements like deleting emails, but the advertisements will appear again after a few minutes.

So is there a way to avoid advertising? Yes, if you are willing to pay $1.99/month, you can turn off ads permanently.