Google literally giving me sex talk lines.
The only “mildly infuriating” part about this is the stray mark you made on the screenshot.
The other stuff – the offensive ad and the abuse of Grace Hopper’s name – is more than “mildly.”
Double tap. OP is a thoughtful person.
I’ve used Gmail since 2005 and don’t ever remember seeing ads, but then again I use ad blockers on pretty much all my devices.
2000 or so for me. I have no idea how people are seeing ads in their inbox.
I have seen it on the gmail app only so far.
And not in the main mail box but in subfolders.yeah it’s only in the subfolders which are bullshit anyways so it’s no surprise longtime users opted out of that as soon as it came along
The public beta started in like 04 or 05 IIRC, I got my Gmail account my freshman year of college. I guess you were one of the cool people that got in on the closed beta.
Literally everyone on Lemmy is 38 years old
Can confirm. Am exactly 38 years old…
Happy birthday!
I am 38.25739 years old!
Just hit 38.0027
It’s all downhill from here
*Quietly* I am not :(
I’m over here telling myself that 50 is the new 38…
Hey! I’m 37!
I was just informed that I’m actually 37…
Uh oh, I’ll be 39 next week, does that mean I need to leave?
Also 04 was still the closed beta I think. Just not super closes. Got an invite from my friend back then
Yeah, I think I got an invite from a friend on a forum I frequented.
I was able to see ads but I had to look for it. I can see them if I enable the promotions section and the look in the promotions section.
So the ads are in the section labeled “ads”, who would have thought! (not being snide with you, just that’s where they should be haha)
give it a few years and you’ll be seeing only ads and maybe an occasional email.
I already did. No change after several years.
Maybe using a free email account offered by an ad company wasn’t such a good idea after all.
I moved my personal email domain to fastmail. I’ve been very happy with it. I am using the Standard plan at $50 per year.
It’s nice being the customer instead of the product.
They can also host static web sites for no additional cost on this plan. So I canceled my web hosting plan too.
I’ll be checking this out later, thanks for sharing!
Fastmail is by far the best email/calendaring service available today. It has everything that Gmail has, plus custom domains, static site hosting. DNS (if you want/need it, I use CloudFlare) and more… All up well worth the money. Don’t self-host email, kiddos!
That’s a terrible idea, as all your registered accounts on that mail address are now just one minimum wage customer service worker away from getting intercepted by a hacker. Just getting dns redirected is enough.
Edit; Misread. Though you were selfhosting email.
Okay, but the rest of these emails also look like advertising spam…
Fair, it’s been a long while since I’ve unsubscribed from the spam I get. I mostly ignore it.
Mostly ignore it
Gotta gamble sometimes since the odds that there are truly milfs in the area is never 0.
I’m more concerned that they reanimated a 30-years-dead Rear Admiral, a founding mother of computer science, and assigned her to help your job search.
B-movie premise: the dead rise and the capitalists realize that they’re cheaper labour than the current precariat.
“This has been linked with major mass political developments including the Brexit referendum in the UK, and the presidency of Donald Trump in the US”
Bingo.
I mean…they know what you like it seems
If OP has personalized ads even enabled.
The times I turned off personalized ads, were the times google ads went really wild. This was both for regular website ads as well as youtube ads. So many cosmetic product ads…
I had to turn it back on again because they were at least partly interesting compared to “SiCk oF aCnE?! sIcK of pImPleS??!”
You guys get ads?
If I chose to.
Yeah, I have turned off personalized ads and I mostly get these inappropriate dating ads. I guess it’s their way of annoying me into enabling personalization.
Do you get the super creepy ‘easten European girls are popular because of their traditional values…’ and the I’ve that’s ‘Chinese women want to come and study in but need loving middle aged men to have sex with them while they’re here…’ I’m paraphraseing of course but that’s basically what they say.
Makes me laugh when everything is sanitized because advertiser’s don’t want to appear next to anything untoward then the adverts are for human traffickers.
Though honestly the ‘student was expelled for inventing a more efficient heater’ advert is possibly worse, of course he was expelled he broke the laws of physics, he should have been arrested! Why is such an obvious scam allowed but a friendly Australian can’t call his cobba a cunt?
I do rarely use Gmail on my phone, but those probably showed up in some form of another at some point, lol
just use uBlock Origin. It’s that easy.
That… doesn’t work in the Gmail app. I have it installed on both desktop and mobile Firefox though. ✌️
k-9 is a mozilla project now. thunderbird always has been.
Yeah I heard of it just today, looking to set it up and try it out some time. 👍
Interestingly enough, no. I do like anime, though, so maybe they made that assumption.
IIT: People who’ve never used Gmail complaining about how it’s full of ads. They only appear in the “promotions” tab, which is where Gmail sends stuff that’s already borderline spam. In other words you don’t see ads unless you go looking for them.
I use gmail a lot on my phone, and I have seen ads, but I’ve never seen an ad like that. My point was I was mildly irritated that it gave me a sex line ad. It made me feel angry for the trafficked sex workers probably running a majority of those lines. I generally would imagine Google to be more choosy about their adds. This ad felt icky, which mildly irritated me.
I mean google is one of the companies that tracks you the most these days so it would be unusual for it to show you an ad for something you or someone with your ad tracking id haven’t shown any interest in the past.
Just saying.
Really? Everyone who sees ads for sex lines has shown Google they have interest in sex lines?
Bro got exposed by Google
Please lick my boots
I don’t see anyone else here recommending K-9 Mail for Android, and I think that’s sad because it’s really good. Open source, supports viewing message headers, multi-account, hides remote images by default to prevent tracking…
I like K-9 (soon to be Thunderbird)
Change to protonmail and move away from google altogether.
Or Fastmail
Exactly, I don’t trust a free email service 😂
I’m slowly beginning the process of moving to Proton Mail. Staying with the free account for now, but really want to get away from Gmail.
Same, for this reason.
Absolutely proprietary!
Or maybe choose something that isn’t such a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Yeah, they have more than five users, they must be hiding something. It’s only logical.
Which are you claiming to be the wolf? It was just a little bit ambiguous for me.
Proton Mail is not a service that can be trusted and it is fairly expensive
Why can’t it be trusted? Can any service be trusted? I’m not going to host my own email service. 💀
They promote proprietary software in the form of JavaScript and they claim encryption and 100% privacy for a protocol that isn’t secure or designed to be secure.
What does this claim look like? I mean, I’ll bite if all they claim is that they offer 100 % privacy from their end, so they don’t do anything with my data. That’s good enough for me.
And promoting proprietary software in the form of JavaScript, is that an inherently bad thing apart from being proprietary?
Just curious because you seem rather emphatic about this so I’d like to know more about your thoughts, since I am a potential customer.
That’s an email client. Do you have a email provider you like that is compatible with it?
Gmail works with it.
But Gmail could technically pump the same ads over IMAP if they wanted to.
Technically it’s not the same, in case of IMAP they would need to literally put spam mails into your account. As opposed to having visual elements in the UI that pretend to be an email. Might not feel like a big difference but actively poisoning the users inbox is pretty bad.
Yeah, while technically possible, I don’t see that happening for the exact reason you said. 👍
Mailbox.org is pretty nice, I’ve been using it since a few months now, because it’s compatible with basically all email clients (unlike protonmail) and they have a very cheap plan too.
Using it for almost 3 years now, it’s great. Together with K9-Mail ofc!
Thanks for sharing, I am seriously considering it. I just have a hard time justifying the purchase to myself. I kinda worry that I am just acting on a somewhat emotional fear of being watched.
Understandable, just give the decision some time and you’ll know what’s best.
Something something if you’re not paying for it then you are the product
I’m not paying for firefox though…
It’s a stupid saying popular with self righteous people.
That’s not an exception. Librewolf is.
Are you paying for Librewolf? I’m not sure what you meant to say.
He means with Firefox, you’re still the product.
But no
Eh, by default FF has a bunch of telemetry enabled. Nowhere near as bad as the others, but Librewolf has that all disabled out of the box.
Surely the telemetry only consists of stuff that they use to give back to the community? Usage data to drive innovation?
I might be naive, but that’s how I imagine it.
Selling usage data to google. Yeah. Definately.
As per Librewolf it’s not business product.
Free is not at no cost but rather Free as in Freedom. Production may but paid for but request or donation but it is even then still not a business product. It is not a capitalist product. Free is Freedom truly in this sense even though production may cost money in this capitalist tyrrany. Cost is, again, by choice, pursuit/desire of particularity by a nonprogrammer, or donation.
Surely Mozilla was built like that but google bought it is in a certainly assassination objective. No doubt. That’s the whole fucking point of this thread’s post and observation. Y’all fucking quick about it.
Looks like someone fat fingered while cropping. It happens to everyone.
Google knows what you like and these days they will take any ad because they fired all the screening staff. My ads are usually pretty average since I opt out of everything I possibly can opt out of and I use Startpage for search, so they aren’t as targeted. That’s one positive thing about Google. They started as a relatively ethical company for an ad company, so there’s a lot of code and best practices in place for opting out of things. That is fading, but it’s way better than others. Like Facebook showing ads for things I searched for a few seconds ago on Amazon and stuff like that.
Amazon sharing data with Facebook? I kinda doubt that.
Facebook has crawlers that follow you around the web. It’s not that Amazon is sharing info, it’s that Facebook is tracking your browsing history (if you let it).
There are ads in Gmail?
They’re in the “promotions” tab.
which
- can be disabled
- that tab is already a place where gmail puts spam ads
(kinda a smart decision to add their own ads there too lol)
this should be more than mildly infuriating to you.
You might want to ditch google for something like proton if you can, and if you can’t use Thunderbird to view your emails.
the ads only appear in the “Promotions/Ads” tab, which is an email category for junk and ads. (ones that don’t include any useful information but come from legitimate companies and don’t qualify for the “Spam” tab)
It CAN be disabled (together with the whole sorting feature, which is spyware anyway (enabling it automatically grants google permission to look at your emails))
and also i think the decision to add their own ads there is actually pretty clever lol.Yep, and so you know there’s a lot to complain about if Google, that decision is not one of them .
It would be clever if they fit and I might actually click on them.
Honestly, I did the whole “inbox filter tabs” thing a long time ago, and it was real useful before when I had a few spammy, usually “news letter” or “promotion” email that I might use. But at this point it’s just where the email I don’t really want but don’t want to deal with go to die.
I appreciate the info, though, and I’ve already turned it off, but I might just turn it back on because idgaf about the ads really since I barely look at that tab/section of my mail anyway. At his point, I’m prolly just going to go to proton mail for now and just update my email with my important contacts. I’ve been trying to get away from Google for a while, I just haven’t had the time to complete the transition on all services.
What alternative(s) to gmail you’d recommend?
Proton is cool
Spark for Android. EMclient for desktop. Both have combined inboxes.
I definitely need to make that switch, and I’ve been “in the process” of making the switch for a while.
I will take your advice about Thunderbird because my work email is gmail only.
thunderbird should connect to gmail too :)
