groovyf, you don't have to use the Akismet addon. The new spam blocking features of 1.6 are catching most of the spam (93.4% in my blog to be exact). After the PP-included spam measuring methods Akismet checks the rest of them. In my blog that is 6.6%, I had 3 spam-comments not recognized as spam by Akismet and 1 wrong-recognized good comment since the beginning of April.
You can see the life statistic here:
http://blog.uhlig.at/spamlog/
KArin