You cant deal with a lot of the spam today because of the lack of Common Expression support.
This means for certain groups NL cant be used.
Well not if you want to load headers and read posts anyways.
Agent and NB pro are OK because you can write filters to match the spam.
The only tools available to you in the current versions of NL are the crosspost filter and the poster filter.
Subject filters are mostly useless because there is no wildcard support.
So when dealing with an obfuscated poster who changes subject and from with every post there is nothing you can do if using NL
If you are very lucky they are cross posting and you can have the crosspost filter set to a low number.
A lot don't crosspost anymore so you are screwed.
There is someone posting now in teevee that could become a major irritant to NL users as they have no way to filter them out.
Lets hope they don't get more active.