Gmail baits phishing spam, demonstrating there is a public good in email scanning
Google has been testing phishing detection in Gmail. I just noticed it tonight but SVW reader Eric Pederson comments below that he first saw it a few months ago. In their battle of one-upmanship with Yahoo Mail, phishing detection is a huge advantage.
Presumably they can do this because they're scanning the contents of your mail. While this drives privacy advocates nuts [The Register], that fact provides them a lot of power to deliver features that users need. Email providers have a moral responsibility to try to protect their users, and now that Google has shown a way to identify phishing, could other providers have a legal responsibility to offer similar protections?