Email Privacy Bill Passed by Californian Senate

The bill formerly known as anti-Gmail has been approved by the California state Senate 28-4.
The bill would prevent email providers from building personally identifiable profiles by scanning emails and from sharing data with third parties, but it would explicitly permit advertising created in real-time by automated and mechanical analysis. Gmail, Google's email service currently in beta testing, displays targeted ads alongside emails (in this respect it is no different from other free email services that display ads on the same page as email content).
Messages must also not be shown to employees or other "natural persons" and physically deleted — "no longer obtainable in any retrievable format" — after the user has indicated she wants them deleted. This does not seem to affect Bayesian spam filtering, for example, which breaks messages apart and stores statistical information about spaminess for individual tokens persistently.
Additionally, spam and virus filters as well as other means that help maintain or provide email functionality would be explicitly exempt from any scanning bans. (Spammers, you can help me test Gmail's spam filters by picking up einz.einz@gmail.com. I'm also happy if you send me good mail, of course, if it is not too private.)
Please keep in mind, though, that plain text email is never private. The only way to make sure no third party can read your private email communication is encryption. Outside encryption, emails can be — and routinely are — intercepted. You can send encrypted email through Gmail without problems.