A system and method for enhancing spam avoidance efficiency and brand protection by automatically identifying a phishing website without human intervention. The system receives a stream of suspect Internet urls for potential phishing websites and uses a comparison strategy to determine whether the potential phishing website has already be labeled as a bonefid phishing website. A comparison system is utilized in which similarity data is calculated on various elements of the potential phishing website and then compared to similarity data of known phishing websites and known brands to determine whether the site needs human intervention. Various types of categorization structures and notification strategies are utilized in the system, including the adjustment of threshold comparison values in response to the identification of a potential phishing site displaying a brand of interest.