So far, nobody can figure out why. Perhaps we have a new generation of zombies, so numerous that price has dropped and spammers can buy twice as many of them. But whatever it is, if anyone tells you that the worst of spam is over, they're just wrong.

Update on Nov 15th: There's been yet another huge spike in spam today, even beyond last month's level. I noticed it overwhelming my modest servers, and friends at both corporate mail systems and large ISPs say they've seen it, too. We can only deal with so many doublings of the spam load before there just isn't enough hardware and software to handle it.