I don’t know about you, but I spend a lot of time deleting spam messages from my inbox — despite using a junk mail filter. But the issue is about to get a whole lot worse, with Google gearing up to deliver adverts to our Gmail inboxes. The messages will appear under the new Promotions tab that was recently introduced in a Gmail update, and Google is testing them on a small number of users now.

Google’s latest Gmail update filters your email into three inboxes — Primary, Social, and Promotions — to make them more manageable. So you know that when you open up your Gmail app, or visit Gmail in your browser, all of your important email will be in the first, all of your Facebook updates will be in the second, and all of the stuff you don’t care about will be in the third.

And if that third email inbox wasn’t already filling up fast enough, Google is going to add to it. CNET reports that the company will soon deliver advertising messages to your Promotions box, as noticed by Antonio Gulli who posted the screenshot above to Twitter.

The messages will be highlighted so that you know they’re from Google — not just regular spam — and you’ll be able to customize your settings so that you won’t see ads you don’t want to see. You can even star ads that you want to go back to later, and forward them to friends (or enemies).

However, it appears you cannot disable them completely — unless you disable the new tabs and go back to the old Gmail inbox, which probably won’t be around forever.

Of course, these ads are another way for Google to cash in on our Gmail accounts, and they’ll help pay for the service so that we don’t have to. But they’ll surely be annoying, too; I can’t imagine anyone wants more ads in their inbox.

• SourceTwitter
• ViaCNET