I cannot be sure when I first started receiving spam in my Inbox, but in all likelihood it was around 
the time I got my first Internet e-mail account, circa April, 1995. It was a minor nuisance then, and before long it became a major pain.
Fortunately as spam developed so did anti-spam technology, and though today I am still plagued by junk mail, it has gotten better. Desktop tools such as Outlook's Junk Mail filter are still no match for server-level tools like Microsoft's Intelligent Mail Filter (included with Exchange Server 2007) or Exclaimer Mail Utilities (a third party utility that does a super job). The ability for them to learn and recognize spam makes it easier for us as end-users to deal with the questionable 'possible' spam by eliminating the 'definitely' spam.
Spam has expanded too, and is no longer exclusively an e-mail problem. We are now seeing spam come in on out Instant Messenger programs, and recently I noticed another area which I had never suspected to be a target - people are spamming my blog!
Of course, you would never know that as a reader because they are not able to post content, only replies to my original posts. If you have ever posted a Comment to my blog (which I encourage) you will have noticed that there is a delay between when you post it and when it appears. That is because unless you are a registered user on mitchgarvis.com (which is not anything I have ever encouraged or even mentioned) I have to approve any comments before they appear. I receive a notification that there is a comment waiting, I read it, and I either Approve or Delete it. I do not delete comments I do not like, only those that are spam.
My blog (actually my entire site) are hosted by The Lazy Admin on a server provided by RackForce, built on a server running Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003 R2, using a platform called Community Server which sits on top of Internet Information Services. The blog engine is a component of Community Server, and it includes some pretty powerful spam tools. Every comment that I receive is scored for possible spam content, based on all manner of criteria. I am able to tweak the weighing of each criteria as I choose, but the defaults work pretty well.
I have been quite pleased by the spam tools included with Community Server because just like with 
e-mail spam, blog spam is becoming a huge problem because once the engines find your blog (and I do not hide mine) it costs them nothing to generate comments to it. They do not know that their comments never see the light of day - the military terms the type of technology 'Fire and Forget'... it shoots its comments out and does not know what it is going to hit, only that it might achieve its goal.
Of course, you would never know about any of this because between all of the technologies involved (and needing my approval) you have never actually seen Blog Spam before, at least not on mitchgarvis.com, and you are not likely to. So continue to enjoy my blog which likely contains a lot of ramblings, exciting articles about my travels, a hint of this and that about SCCM, deployment, certifications, Server, Windows Vista, my girlfriend (Theresa), her son (Aaron), our puppy (Jacob), and our dog (Bailey)...but never even a hint of spam.
Frankly I had enough loof in the army, and never need to see a processed meat again, either physical or electronic.