In July, we reported that some users of Gmail began to notice that Google was putting in ads in the Promotions folder that were made to look like emails. Google tried to explain away these ad-emails as a replacement for showing ad links on top of the Gmail inbox, but the practice made quite a few Gmail users upset, complaining that Google was sending spam in their Promotions folder.
Microsoft has decided to take notice as part of its latest chapter in the long running Scroogled marketing campaign against Google over the disguised email ads and wants to highlight how Google only values its ad placements and not your content. The Scroolged website offers up Microsoft"s own opinion on the practice:
Your email provider should protect you from spam, but Google is doing just the opposite; they"re reading your private email conversations and using what they find to push junk mail directly to your Gmail inbox.
In fact, Microsoft apparently called the practice "Gspam", at least according to ZDNet. The site spotted a blog post from Microsoft that used the term but apparently that post was taken down today.
This new campaign is also designed to get Gmail customers to jump ship and start using Microsoft"s own Outlook.com service, which recently celebrated its first anniversary.
This is of course not the first time that Microsoft has attacked Google and Gmail. In February, Microsoft published the results of a survey which showed that 70 percent of consumers "don"t know that major email providers routinely engage in the practice of reading through their personal email to sell ads", while 88 percent of those surveyed disapprove of those kinds of actions.