My spam at work seemed to drop from 25/week to 15/week in August. However, I seem to be hit by only a few spammers (similarities in headers and bodies), so maybe one just quit or was murdered.

Does anyone else see the once-almighty BrightMail as totally worthless? My Earthlink account apparently has it, but it filters essentially no spam, despite my relentless marking. I thought BrightMail was THE best spam filter, with millions of spamtrap addresses and human confirmation?

My work mail is now protected by ultra-agressively-targeted custom mailfilter rules, filtering the specific footprints of the apparently few spammers. Footprints are largely provided by SpamAssassian tagging in the headers, which just keeps getting more and more specific. That's backed up by the Spam Bayes plugin for Outlook, demolishing any other remaining spam (even using my IMAP connection).

The only stuff that sneaks by (because my mailfilter rule isn't perfected yet) are the image-only spams with Bayesian poison (strings of legitimate text randomly pulled from documents). The HTML links are so obfuscated with "cid" links, #, ?, and redirects that SpamAssassian can't assign the HTML_IMAGE_ONLY tag. And the Bayesian poison are full sentences of common words. Thank heavens they all have a similar forged HELO tag in the header. Trusty mailfilter wins again.