Verizons new ad tool lets marketers send emails when you look at your inbox

Verizon quietly introduced a new email marketing feature yesterday that it calls “View Time Optimization,” which the company says automatically times advertisements to the moment you’re looking at your email inbox so that the ad arrives at the very top as a new message.

The service is part of Verizon’s suite of email and web advertising properties, which includes AOL and Yahoo, and well-known programmer David Heinemeier Hansson (the inventor of the Ruby on Rails web application framework) called out Verizon on Twitter on Friday for what he calls an “Orwellian” ad placement tool.

(It should be noted Hansson is helping develop a privacy-focused email client called Hey through his company Basecamp, of which he is the co-founder and chief...

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