correct; acquired in 2013.

it is very possible that through poor design choice on their part, the two are connected. i have seen similar elsewhere numerous times.

so maybe you should step back a bit, count to ‘10’, take a deep breath. and do it. it won’t hurt you to flip a few blips over. and holy fuck, dude. chill, just a little.

did you actually turn off all the ‘subscriptions’? the first shot you included has a still few enabled, including one that could be the magic thing to turn off (product announcements) what you’re so worked-up over.

uninstall the ‘new’ outlook app and use the ‘old’ mail app if you must. can at least do that, until they forcibly remove the old one and migrate users.

the new-look thunderbird is ok, as is emclient (proprietary but free-to-use version is available).

this gen x’er isn’t keen on the idea, either. before the days of cell phones, the street lights coming on was the cue it was time to go home–and we could go pretty much anywhere in our (small) town. and later as a teen when we lived close to a city, all mom wanted to know was whether i’d be home for supper. there was no worry because every ‘horrible’ thing to happen to a kid wasn’t published or broadcast for the world to see.

disable unicode representation of these types of domains in firefox by flipping this setting (in about:config) from the default ‘false’ to TRUE:

network.IDN_show_punycode

so you see аррӏе.com instead of аррӏе.com

compare to (the real deal): apple.com

brave has its own ‘issues’ that should keep you far away from it.

pihole by itself does not remove all the ads and trackers, just ones that come from different hostnames than the site being accessed–which can be blocked by dns.

a browser-based blocker is essential.