I enjoy the massacre of ads. This sentence will slaughter ads without a messy bloodbath.

It’s two sentences actually, but appended to emails, it kills the ads in Gmail without bothering with any special coding. How?

Gmail uses the words contained in your emails to generate the ads on the right side of the screen and those integrated into other locations. But Google also blocks words related to tragic or catastrophic events in all of their advertising. Adding the sentence above attempts to query an ad pool that simply does not exist. Instead of advertisements you get a nice blank space, like you are using your email client of choice (which Gmail is (sort of), for many).

The trick comes from LifeHacker via the personal blog of one Joe McKay. His coverage of the “hack” is much more extensive than the LifeHacker post, but LifeHacker gets authorial credit for the two sentence phrase that seems to work for every email. As McKay points out, email length does matter, and to ensure an ad free experience, you’ll need one blocked word for every 167 acceptable words. LifeHacker says they’ve tested different length emails with the two sentences at the top of this post and they’ve worked every time.

Source: Joe McKay