I get plenty of antivirus 'your payment has failed, click to update' attempts in my spam folder, but to see a paid ad hosted on the free version of Outlook for Windows 11 is very troubling. I have Gmail connected to the Outlook app and this is where the ad showed.
This is bad, but not as bad as the "Unlock Premium" ad every single corporate/enterprise Teams user got (locked in the title bar on Windows and macOS). Hiding the ad required an admin to turn off "self-service", a hard to find setting buried in the "Org Settings" within Microsoft 365 admin center. I can't even blame this on AI/Microslop.
Linux users are still behind on this innovation. Big corporations with money can move much faster. The closest I got on Fedora was a "donate to the author" button in a game launcher I installed last week. I saw it once. That pretty much exhausts my "modern platform" experience for the past few months.
Still waiting for the copilot button in cat | grep.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 27.0 ms ] threadhttps://imgur.com/a/O9bjjQQ
Edit: better screencap https://imgur.com/a/Qra5Ohp
Update: had to refresh a few times but it came back and here's where the 'ad' leads to: https://imgur.com/a/MSDzFhs
https://blog.mindcore.dk/2025/10/unlock-teams-premium-prompt...
Imagine the website the ad points to is malicious and manages to install or exploit something.
Outlook happily displays and opens this without confirmation, as long as you pay them for it.
Still waiting for the copilot button in cat | grep.