Aksimet: Too Enthusiastic in Spamming Comments?

Darren of Problogger finally articulates something that has been bothering me for a while: [Aksimet](http://akismet.com), Automattic’s comment spam filtering system, seems to be [throwing up a lot of false positives](http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/05/27/my-love-hate-relationship-with-akismet/) of late. 

I’ve been using Akismet on this blog for a couple of years and we’ve been using it on the RBI blogs for around a year – and generally it’s been good. But too often of late, I’ve been getting e-mails from people saying that they’d left comments, but they never appear on the blog(s). I hope that they get on top of this soon, because I’d rather have more false negatives than any false positives. When you’re having to scan the spam folder in case of false positives most days, your trust in a spam-fighting system is shot, because you’re not that far from just doing the despamming manually.