Boing Boing has a story up about someone being mislabeled as a spammer. There are a number of posts up on the weblog about it, including one talking about how easy it is to report someone as a spammer.
This got me thinking a bit more about services like SpamCop. ISPs supposedly pay enough attention to them that if you are labeled a spammer they don't want you as a customer. But there's no form of control here. Even if everyone involved gets together to show them an error, SpamCop isn't listening. IMHO, this makes their service less effective.
On other spam fronts, I'm experimenting with the new spam filtering features in Jaguar. The latest version of the OS X Mail app lets you tag messages as spam and supposedly learns over time what is and isn't spam. Currently I've turned off spamassassin and am letting Mail do its thing. So far it is doing a pretty good job. It hasn't misreported any regular mail as spam and has caught most of the spam I've gotten. I'll report more in a month or so.
One other thing I discoved that OS X Mail can do is bounce messages back to the sender saying that the message couldn't be delivered. I'm thinking of tying this into the spam detection so that when I get spam it bounces the message back like I don't exist. The question is if most spammers are listening for message bounces.
