A pox on spammers

I've been living in cloud cuckoo land for way too long. I thought that my stream of microposts was somehow of no importance to spammers (or anyone else, for that matter) because there were generally very few comments when I looked. However, it seems that old posts were being targetted with a vengeance, and were getting through. The real failure was that I was no longer receiving emails when comments came in, because I had failed to notice a change in authorisation of outgoing mail.

That fixed, I now get the odd email drifting in from a spammer, two or three a day, and when I go to check the post I find 20, sometimes 30, older spam comments. Right now I have to delete them one at a time, which is OK. If it gets more tedious, though, I may be forced to go in and take a sledgehammer to my database, which will not end well.

I suppose even spammers have to make a living, and I'm sure the vast majority of them are being exploited just as ruthlessly as their paymasters are exploiting my site. Do people think of skanky comments in the silos as spam? Is this something that afflicts only those of us trying to enjoy the old-fashioned web?