There is now so much spam being caught by th Akismet filter, that I will no longer be going through there to look for comments that were snagged by the filter. If you don’t see your comment by the next day . . . it’s been swallowed, and gone into the deep, dark bowels of internet Hell . . . whatever that is.
I’m actually not smart enough to know the solution . . . anyone?
Akismet filters out about 2000 spams a month for me. About half a dozen comments a week sneak through (usually on older posts) that I have to delete by hand. I never look over what’s deleted automatically. No one has ever complained. I could be wrong. I also regularly delete the spam to contribute to the database.
Ellis has the point I was going to emphasize; when you manually admit individual posts, it takes them out of the spam database. By continually checking and modifying that common database, it helps everyone. And slowly, the spam filters get better. But it is a pain in the anatomy, I agree.