This is some kind of solution? He moved the obtrusive content from the sidebar to right inside the email?

How am I supposed to include the catastrophic event reference in a corporate/business mail?

Thats cute.. I paid for premier and I don't have any ads and didn't need to tell my friends about catastrophic events. $50 per year is definitely worth it.

"Do you resent the "Sponsored Link" advertisements that come up next to the incoming mail?"

Resent what?... Seriously, my case of ad blindness is so severe it took me several seconds to remember/realize gmail has ads...

Especially considering that having the link advertisements is essentially my payment for the gmail service. If you don't think it is a good deal to receive the gmail service in exchange for having to have the advertisements of the page (which you don't have to look at), you don't have to use gmail.

Ha! Not sure what my mom would think if I sent her an email with suicide in my signature. Plus, Google does crawl your emails, any concern that if you consistently use "bad" keywords it might alert the Black Helicopters to come swooping down and nab you? :)

This is so wrong, but somehow, morbidly amusing. I certainly don't think the adds are obtrusive enough to have my sig read "suicide death 9/11 murder", but each to his own... Thunderbird seems like a more elegant, cheerful solution.

What you'd really want to do is work the advertisement extermination into the body of the email inconspicuously. Say I'm mailing my friend Katrina about a concert I'd kill for tickets to--I make an offhand reference to the financial crisis, a tsunami of corporate catastrophes, how the markets quake in fear of another fiscal tragedy. Just like that, an advertisement genocide. I'm sure it'd soon become as natural a way of writing as e-prime.

At the bottom he suggests that "These words are designed to kill advertisements" works.

This guy should poke his head out of Safari and discover Firefox with Ad Block Plus before embarrassing himself.

While I haven't found FF extensions to be enough of a reason to switch away from a WebKit based browser, I'm looking forward to Chrome extensions.

That's what I was thinking too but there's an ad blocker for safari also http://burgersoftware.com/en/safariadblock

I thought Pith Helmet was the Safari ad blocker.

Last time I tried it (four months ago) it did not work well. ABP is comprehensive.

I use it, it works fine. You can even subscribe to the same things ABP does.

Uses ABP lists.