Spam, spam, spam, spam

Much as I love Monty Python, I'm increasingly fed up of spam, but as a small PR business owner who represents clients, my details appear on press releases posted in places where web crawlers go.
For a while, my ISP (BT broadband) seemed to be doing an OK job of filtering spam and my own message rules and blocked senders list took care of much of the rest.
But there's been a recent increase in US investment-related trash trying to talk up low value shares (apparently it works fleetingly, but by the time we get the emails, the early birds have mostly extracted the inflated value, generating a reversion on the share price).
Plus phishing attempts on behalf of banks and payment systems, some of which I've never even heard of, despite being in banking for 13 years.
Not to mention all those people out there that, for some reason, think I need a bigger, better willy (in case you haven't twigged, I am not a bloke), or any other form of med$ (my body is a temple although some wine and malts do slip in on high feast and priest days).
Like many small business owners, I know enough IT to get by (and after twenty years, I have all sorts of useless bits of DOS and other arcane OS floating around my head). But really, expecting individual computer owners to deal with this avalanche of 'stuff' is patently ridiculous. And it's instructive to note that my MS Word spell-checker doesn't even have the word 'spam' in its dictionary!
ISPs are in a much stronger position to spot a flood of material, evaluate it and stop it in its tracks, or forward it with a spam? flag in the subject line so we can trash it using message rules.
I have been doing my bit, patiently forwarding offending spam to my ISP in the full knowledge that most spam uses a once-only source address, so it's a waste of time. And recently, it's been taking up far too much time.
I can't help but think that the prospect of facing an enormous fine would focus ISPs on finding a solution in no time and look forward to the first prosecutions of ISPs for inflicting this time-wasting rubbish on us.
Just think of what spam is doing collectively. It must be sapping millions of years-worth of endeavour all over the planet. What could we achieve if we aggregated all the time wasted by spam? We might have conquered climate change, cancer and most other diseases of the mind and body, fed the world and colonised the moon before breakfast!
In the meantime, a free download of Mailwasher from ComputerActive magazine's website (the only source of software downloads I like) and I am bouncing spam with fake emails saying my email address doesn't exist (heh heh) and creating blacklists of entire domains. Plus Mailwasher allows you to apply other well-known blacklists to beat the spammers.
In just 24 hours, spam has all but gone: wheee heee!
And while you're at ComputerActive downloads, if your computer doesn't have antivirus, a firewall and spyware protection, there's no excuse because you can download AVG anti-virus plus the excellent Zonealarm firewall, plus Ad-aware to keep things protected.