To be more accurate the article says they stopped scanning for ads that appear inside gmail. Whether they still scan emails in the free gmail for use outside gmail is unknown, but I may be being pedantic...

(disclosure, I work on gmail, although nothing related to ads)

I can't find a citation, but I'm fairly confident that that's never been the case. Ad targeting from emails has always been siloed to within gmail. To quote the post:

>Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change.

That's pretty unequivocal.

Thanks!

Any spam filtering implies scanning right? (Unless the filtering is purely on basis of headers and other non-message-body info)

It depends on whether you consider mail headers part of the email. I personally think scanning mail headers still counts as scanning email.

Well yeah. They have to scan content for you to effectively search your own email, which is one of their flagship features.

I can't edit the above, but the context I meant was non-ad, non-email purposes.