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.

https://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

The photo offers no confirmation the ad ran in the Outlook app. Can you screenshot a wider view?

On the right top side of the image you can see a little rounded square that says "Ad"

I had to look thrice to find it.

I updated the original post.

I have no experience with that app -- is that an ad, or an email that it categorized and labeled as an Ad?

It looks like a normal email but has the word “Ad” in small letters. When you click it, it opens a link, rather than rendering email content in another pane.

It’s a pretty tacky design, in my opinion, even if it was only serving “legitimate” ads.

That is not tacky design.

I would call this malicious in and of itself. That is insane.

Looks like the latter

It's not. This is how the free version of Outlook that comes with Windows displays ads.

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.

https://blog.mindcore.dk/2025/10/unlock-teams-premium-prompt...

I'd argue that this is much worse in a different way.

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.

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.

Imgur doesn’t work in the UK, is there a mirror?

https://rimgo.bloat.cat/a/O9bjjQQ https://rimgo.bloat.cat/a/Qra5Ohp https://rimgo.bloat.cat/a/MSDzFhs

Try this: https://pasteboard.co/JYr36KObMIIu.png

That returns a 503 error

Have you tried getting rid of the regime?

Install adguard for God sake