Well that's definitly an oxymoron, use your own mail server, or paid mail server, use imap for google, ose AdBlock, or just don't use free service if you don't want ads...

> You can’t stop Google from scanning your inbox

You can encrypt your email which would stop Google scanning it. I guess even ROT13 would work.

But if a service is showing you too many ads the answer is to find another service or pay for the service.

(If Googlers are reading this there is a problem with some ads when using Chrome to browse the web. Some ads open the ap store. This takes me out of Chrome. This is bad. Almost as bad as IE's "content type=crash" bug.)

It's somewhat interesting to me that articles like this make no mention of services such as AdBlock.

...then again, cnet does get by on advertising dollars.