lol, what? I am not jongales.

I have not noticed ads on markmail. I was mostly surprised people are advocating blocking markmail because I've seen it linked to often by the Apache project sites:

http://couchdb.apache.org/community/lists.html http://shindig.apache.org/mail-lists.html

I've also noticed when people refer to an posting on the mailing list, they often use the markmail URL.

So it seemed like it has the blessing of the community.