Looks at the ad in my Gmail

The only "mildly infuriating" part about this is the stray mark you made on the screenshot.
The other stuff -- the offensive ad and the abuse of Grace Hopper's name -- is more than "mildly."
- Double tap. OP is a thoughtful person.

I've used Gmail since 2005 and don't ever remember seeing ads, but then again I use ad blockers on pretty much all my devices.
- 2000 or so for me. I have no idea how people are seeing ads in their inbox.
  
  I have seen it on the gmail app only so far.
  And not in the main mail box but in subfolders.
  
  The public beta started in like 04 or 05 IIRC, I got my Gmail account my freshman year of college. I guess you were one of the cool people that got in on the closed beta.
- I was able to see ads but I had to look for it. I can see them if I enable the promotions section and the look in the promotions section.
  
  So the ads are in the section labeled "ads", who would have thought! (not being snide with you, just that's where they should be haha)
  
  give it a few years and you'll be seeing only ads and maybe an occasional email.

Maybe using a free email account offered by an ad company wasn't such a good idea after all.

I moved my personal email domain to fastmail. I've been very happy with it. I am using the Standard plan at $50 per year.
It's nice being the customer instead of the product.
They can also host static web sites for no additional cost on this plan. So I canceled my web hosting plan too.
- I'll be checking this out later, thanks for sharing!
- Fastmail is by far the best email/calendaring service available today. It has everything that Gmail has, plus custom domains, static site hosting. DNS (if you want/need it, I use CloudFlare) and more... All up well worth the money. Don't self-host email, kiddos!
- That's a terrible idea, as all your registered accounts on that mail address are now just one minimum wage customer service worker away from getting intercepted by a hacker. Just getting dns redirected is enough.
  Edit; Misread. Though you were selfhosting email.

Okay, but the rest of these emails also look like advertising spam...
- Fair, it’s been a long while since I’ve unsubscribed from the spam I get. I mostly ignore it.
  
  Mostly ignore it
  Gotta gamble sometimes since the odds that there are truly milfs in the area is never 0.

I'm more concerned that they reanimated a 30-years-dead Rear Admiral, a founding mother of computer science, and assigned her to help your job search.
B-movie premise: the dead rise and the capitalists realize that they're cheaper labour than the current precariat.
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat
  
  "This has been linked with major mass political developments including the Brexit referendum in the UK, and the presidency of Donald Trump in the US"
  Bingo.

IIT: People who've never used Gmail complaining about how it's full of ads. They only appear in the "promotions" tab, which is where Gmail sends stuff that's already borderline spam. In other words you don't see ads unless you go looking for them.
- I use gmail a lot on my phone, and I have seen ads, but I’ve never seen an ad like that. My point was I was mildly irritated that it gave me a sex line ad. It made me feel angry for the trafficked sex workers probably running a majority of those lines. I generally would imagine Google to be more choosy about their adds. This ad felt icky, which mildly irritated me.
  
  I mean google is one of the companies that tracks you the most these days so it would be unusual for it to show you an ad for something you or someone with your ad tracking id haven't shown any interest in the past.
  Just saying.
- Please lick my boots

I mean...they know what you like it seems
- If OP has personalized ads even enabled.
  The times I turned off personalized ads, were the times google ads went really wild. This was both for regular website ads as well as youtube ads. So many cosmetic product ads...
  I had to turn it back on again because they were at least partly interesting compared to "SiCk oF aCnE?! sIcK of pImPleS??!"
  
  You guys get ads?
  
  Yeah, I have turned off personalized ads and I mostly get these inappropriate dating ads. I guess it's their way of annoying me into enabling personalization.
- Interestingly enough, no. I do like anime, though, so maybe they made that assumption.

I like K-9 (soon to be Thunderbird)
https://k9mail.app/
- Change to protonmail and move away from google altogether.
  
  Or Fastmail
  
  I’m slowly beginning the process of moving to Proton Mail. Staying with the free account for now, but really want to get away from Gmail.
  
  Absolutely proprietary!
  
  Or maybe choose something that isn't such a wolf in sheep's clothing.
- That's an email client. Do you have a email provider you like that is compatible with it?
  
  Gmail works with it.
  But Gmail could technically pump the same ads over IMAP if they wanted to.
  
  Mailbox.org is pretty nice, I've been using it since a few months now, because it's compatible with basically all email clients (unlike protonmail) and they have a very cheap plan too.

I don't see anyone else here recommending K-9 Mail for Android, and I think that's sad because it's really good. Open source, supports viewing message headers, multi-account, hides remote images by default to prevent tracking...

Something something if you're not paying for it then you are the product
- I'm not paying for firefox though...
  
  It's a stupid saying popular with self righteous people.
  
  That's not an exception. Librewolf is.

There are ads in Gmail?
- They're in the "promotions" tab.
  
  which
  can be disabled
  that tab is already a place where gmail puts spam ads
  (kinda a smart decision to add their own ads there too lol)

Looks like someone fat fingered while cropping. It happens to everyone.

Google knows what you like and these days they will take any ad because they fired all the screening staff. My ads are usually pretty average since I opt out of everything I possibly can opt out of and I use Startpage for search, so they aren't as targeted. That's one positive thing about Google. They started as a relatively ethical company for an ad company, so there's a lot of code and best practices in place for opting out of things. That is fading, but it's way better than others. Like Facebook showing ads for things I searched for a few seconds ago on Amazon and stuff like that.
- Amazon sharing data with Facebook? I kinda doubt that.
  
  Facebook has crawlers that follow you around the web. It's not that Amazon is sharing info, it's that Facebook is tracking your browsing history (if you let it).

this should be more than mildly infuriating to you.
You might want to ditch google for something like proton if you can, and if you can't use Thunderbird to view your emails.
- the ads only appear in the "Promotions/Ads" tab, which is an email category for junk and ads. (ones that don't include any useful information but come from legitimate companies and don't qualify for the "Spam" tab)
  It CAN be disabled (together with the whole sorting feature, which is spyware anyway (enabling it automatically grants google permission to look at your emails))
  and also i think the decision to add their own ads there is actually pretty clever lol.
  
  Yep, and so you know there's a lot to complain about if Google, that decision is not one of them .
  
  It would be clever if they fit and I might actually click on them.
  Honestly, I did the whole “inbox filter tabs” thing a long time ago, and it was real useful before when I had a few spammy, usually “news letter” or “promotion” email that I might use. But at this point it’s just where the email I don’t really want but don’t want to deal with go to die.
  I appreciate the info, though, and I’ve already turned it off, but I might just turn it back on because idgaf about the ads really since I barely look at that tab/section of my mail anyway. At his point, I’m prolly just going to go to proton mail for now and just update my email with my important contacts. I’ve been trying to get away from Google for a while, I just haven’t had the time to complete the transition on all services.
- Spark for Android. EMclient for desktop. Both have combined inboxes.
- What alternative(s) to gmail you'd recommend?
  
  Proton is cool
- I definitely need to make that switch, and I’ve been “in the process” of making the switch for a while.
  I will take your advice about Thunderbird because my work email is gmail only.
  
  thunderbird should connect to gmail too :)

You can disable this..
- Yep, I just looked it up and did that! Thanks!
- How, I just looked through the settings in the app and couldn't see where?
  
  I had to do it for the wife after I noticed she had them too. I have never seen it in any of my personal Gmail accounts.
  https://support.google.com/mail/answer/3094499

Use a different email client. I use Samsung Email, but that's (of course) only on Samsung.
A good FOSS client would be FairEmail though.
- FairyMail? Sounds interesting
- Fairmail is good. My issue with it is that the F-Froid version did not work with my provider, so I've been using k-9 mail instead.
  It's also foss, and the F-Droid version works with my provider. It's really nice and fully featured.

laughs in tuta~~nota~~.
you seeing this @Tutanota@mastodon.social?
- That's payable for better function from data and storage. Respect is the product.

Get a paid email service, it costs next to nothing and you retain your privacy. Free services hosted by commercial entities are free for a reason.

Like youtube giving me ad's for programs basically flat out saying 'use our app to make porn of your friends'

So how was the service?
- Have you ever tried to chat with 1000+ girls at the same time. F*in nightmare.
  
  Also it turns out I speak zero of the languages in Asia.
  
  Really? I could take it

Spark Mail (ignore the "AI Email" thing in the store listing, it's not intrusive or even a major part of the features) is a nice app and works with multiple providers. It even syncs which accounts you have added across devices.
- It's... okay. I've been using it a lot, and at first it was claiming to be the spiritual successor to Google Inbox. I feel that, but it's also not that. I can't put my finger on it but it feels like it's evolving too fast and I just want its features to settle down so I know what I'm getting.

They've been doing that for years now.
- Never seen a single ad in my gmail app.

User an ad blocker like everybody else
- Suggestion for iOS?
  
  Use private dns on your wifi settings and input dns.adguard.com into the dns setting. Sometimes this can cause connection problems tho. It's a bit hard overall to block stuff on iOS, too strict of an OS
- pretty sure that's the official app
  
  PiHole with a VPN client. You’ll thank me later.
  If you don’t want to go that route you can use AdBlock’s DNS.
  
  https://blokada.org/ Give it a go.