Hooray! Yahoo Mail ditches tagline ads

Those annoying ads the Yahoo Mail has been appending to the bottom of e-mail messages soon will be a thing of the past.

Some at Yahoo apparently didn't like the taglines, either: this is the example the company used to illustrate how the ads can pile up.

(Credit: Yahoo)

Yahoo stopped adding the ads a few days ago, the company said on its Yahoo Mail blog on Friday.

Sounds good to me. Because the ads would be appended after each message, a back-and-forth exchange could lead to an accumulation of the pesky text lines like gradual accretions of soap scum.

I also never cared for Yahoo's text intruding into the content of my letter, which is much more presumptuous than a one-time display ad showing up in a separate frame in a Web page. I wasn't afraid people would think I was actually endorsing whatever product the tagline touted, but I didn't care for the idea of this dreck being archived alongside all those letters I sent my friends and family.

If you want to see how much of a clutter the ads have caused, here's one example: Google has tallied 18,700 instances of the "Be a better friend, newshound, and know-it-all with Yahoo! Mobile" tagline in mailing list postings stored within Google Groups.

Yahoo, under pressure to increase its revenue, probably would like to sell every ad it can. But I suspect the tagline ads weren't that big a deal. The only ones I ever remember seeing had a more indirect potential benefit by promoting Yahoo services.