Spam - Say no more

Is it true the spam problem is getting worse? I never used to have big problems and followed most of the guidelines to avoid spam but it started getting worse earlier this year. I switched on the automatic filter on my server first medium, the stronger. From May this year 17,902 spam were detected. Not only that more an more were getting through the filter - perhaps near 200 per day recently. MailWasher worked okay but didn't learn by itself. Outlook 2003 with it spam filter picked up a few more but that didn't really help. I just installed a plug-in called 'Outlook Spam filter which looks very promising, and it works with IMAP mail. It got rid of almost all spam mails. A few legitimate ones as well, but it is very easy to add these to a friends list. Best of all it is learning. I've been looking for something like that for a while - I don't want to waste any more time on spam.