Microsoft claims Mail and Calendar banner ads are just "an experimental feature"

It was a weird day for some Windows users as they were greeted to advertisements inside the Mail and Calendar app. Microsoft has been pretty open about the advertisement policies and has received backlash in the past for showing apps and games suggestions on various places in Windows 10.

However, Microsoft has been clear on advertisements in Microsoft Office and web apps but it changed today as users started seeing advertisements inside the Mail and Calendar app. Users went on Twitter to complain about the issue post which Microsoft’s head of communications, Frank came forward and cleared the air. He noted that the feature was never intended for broad testing and Microsoft has since turned it off.

This was an experimental feature that was never intended to be tested broadly and it is being turned off.

— Frank X. Shaw (@fxshaw) November 16, 2018

Unfortunately, a little digging into Microsoft’s support website tells a different story. Microsoft has a whole support page dedicated to ads in the Mail app with steps to disable ads inside the settings. If Microsoft never planned to test it broadly then why did they wrote an entire support page for it. Was Microsoft testing the waters with today’s experiment? We might never know what the real reason was but we won’t see ads inside the app for now.