Wait, is email spam still a thing? I only get a few spam a day and Spamassassin easily identifies them.
I had assumed that the spammers had moved off to other mediums. Either that or they are specifically targeting big servers like Gmail and are leaving the smaller servers, with their varied (artisanal) anti-spam approaches alone.
It never stopped. What is however more annoying are all the "marketing messages" from all the companies you ever bought a single thing from in your life. It's incredible how often some companies spam you with this (often more than once a day). Really not sure what they are trying to achieve, but for me it's the resolution never to buy anything from them again as I filter their whole domain permanently.
Those I usually forward to their legal department with a little extra bit that says that I have stopped doing business with them on account of their UCE.
A lot of it is luck. You can go years not seeing much of the really malicious spam and then one day you're on the list and you'll find yourself being bombarded with stuff Spamassassin doesn't touch.
Especially if your organization is a potential financial target.
If anything, it's worse than ever. The favored technique these days is "snowshoe" spamming, where $SPAMMER sends a trickle of spam from a large number of IP addresses. About the only way to stop it is to block the /24, and then they just move on to the next block of IPs they want to ruin. RBLs like Spamhaus are helpful, but there will always be a few spammer IPs that haven't yet been listed. SpamAssassin can be handy, but it's a pain and there's a lot of rope you can hang yourself with. Blocking certain TLDs outright (.cam is a good candidate not just because of this, but also the phishing potential) can be an option.
Even a service as big as Microsoft's has pretty bad spamfiltering though. It's slightly better than an untuned SpamAssassin config but it's really not a lot better.
Another reason could be that I live in a country with very strict anti-spam and privacy laws (Canada). I have always assumed that spammers wouldn't care but who knows...
I had assumed that the spammers had moved off to other mediums. Either that or they are specifically targeting big servers like Gmail and are leaving the smaller servers, with their varied (artisanal) anti-spam approaches alone.