Just for the hell of it, I decided that I wasn't going to delete any of the spam that I received in September. Instead, I let Mac OS X's Mail application just dutifully flag and file it away, for the whole month.
By the end I had nearly 7500 junk messages.
That's about 250 per day. How sad that email has come to this.
It turns out that ignoring your junk mail folder wasn't a good idea. At the end of the month I was so overwhelmed by the number of messages that I couldn't possibly ferret out any legitimate email that was incorrectly identified as junk. I started to try, but awash in a sea of spam, I gritted my teeth and deleted all of them in one fell swoop.
So, damnit, it's back to doing a little daily weeding of the crap pile. It was nice for a while to completely disregard the growing stench of spam, but it didn't work out as well as I'd hoped.