A plague of SPAM

My business email has been a relatively safe haven from SPAM since I opened the account in June 2007. Whether this is indicative of poor marketing on my part, or because of the fact that I use that address almost solely for business correspondence, I have been happy to stay off the SPAMmers' collective radar. Up until recently, the only unsolicited emails I received were for Indian marriage web sites (weird, eh?).

But July has seen an uptick in the amount of email squirreliness perpetrated upon my business account. On a daily basis, I receive one or more emails from obviously spamtastic addresses, with one-word subject lines like "rambunctious" or "supercilious." Fortunately my email provider sees them for what they are and forwards them to my spam folder, but because it also occasionally forwards legitimate emails to that folder I always check it before permanently deleting the contents. This week, the SPAM even transformed into SPIM (SPAM+Instant Messaging). I got a handful of IM requests from the same address before I reported it (declining the request the first time I got it apparently only validated my email address, which apparently gave the green light to keep on a-sending the SPIM).

I have been SPIM-free for two days now, and I'm hoping that trend holds. I'm not sure there's anything else I can do to slow the SPAM, as it's already being treated as garbage by my provider. Any suggestions? Anybody else being unusually deluged with SPAM? Do you think having SPAM in the title, body (repeatedly) and tags of this post is going to get it blocked from any search engines?