I've been using the latest Akismet with another plug-in called Spam Karma. Latest version is 2.x something. Very nice. It places an uuuuuuggly dark grey bar across the bottom of your site showing how many spams it has eaten. You can turn that off in the admin panel. You need to spend a couple minutes tuning it after turning it on through the admin/plug-ins panel. Works great in conjunction with Akismet. I haven't had ANY comment or form spam when using it. Good luck!