I really don’t understand how you can describe Gmail’s tiny ads as ‘bombarding’ you with advertisements when most other email services use huge flash or animated gif banner ads. Google has a better reputation than most anybody else on unobtrusive, relevant, text-only ads.

But hey, if you’re a Google hater, just don’t use it. This ad has an extremely sour and obnoxious tone. Like I said, normally I don’t mind Microsoft or its products, but this type of smear marketing turns me off to a company. To each his own.

Oh, and as another poster pointed out, there is a difference between ‘reading’ and ‘scanning’. Google doesn’t ‘read’ your mail. The ad also insinuates that by scanning email, Google is doing something morally wrong, when the same scanning methods are used to determine if something is spam or not, which you seem to be fine with.

Furthermore, any email service that offers automatic spam filtering will ‘scan’ your messages in a similar automated fashion to try and determine if it is spam or not.

So… no, not accurate.

I’m a Brit who lives in Italy, unfortunately my Italian isn’t that great. The fact that Gmail automatically translates Italian email into English, is a boon. But more importantly, the translations just keep getting better and better. Now the translations are in fact so good, I have to do a double take to make sure the original message was in Italian. Awesome. Double awesome because I have never had to update software, to get better translations!

I no longer notice the ads in Gmail, it’s only when a discussion like this springs up that I’m reminded that Gmail has ads.

Here’s how it works: yahoo, hotmail, or AOL address? Spam. That’s Google spam filtering for you. Spam with gmail address: that’s fine, just flag it 10 times.

They however might see when you load the page and adwords kicks in and does a quick search and displays travel to Montana or a Cabelas Add for ShotGun shells.

Microsoft’s video … suggests Google is in effect reading your email and using that information for promotions. … Google insists.”…our computers scan messages to … show ads that are relevant to you.”

sounds 100% accurate to me….

Secondly, as Google points out, Microsoft also shares data between services.

And thirdly, Google provides free services and makes its money through advertising. If it can give ads that are more relevant, there’s a higher chance the user will find them useful. Also, all top email services have automatic spam filtering.

If you don’t like how Google works, don’t use it. As they point out, they make it very easy to take your data and move to another service, and provide a dashboard to see what services are active and what data they have. Microsoft does neither of these things.

Shame, Microsoft. Google has never done smear campaigns on you.