Please help/first post/a million spam comments

Greetings,

So, I’m a first-time poster and am a relative newcomer to having my own website (even though I’ve had the domain almost eight years now, the only thing up and running is my WP blog). Every time I log into my admin area (dashboard) of my blog site, I have about 1,500 spam comments waiting to be triaged. I just activated Akismet (I think it is) but I want to know if there’s a way to prevent them from showing up in the first place. I don’t have a spare hour every day to go through and delete a bunch of crap comments from coming in.

Also, is there a way to mass-remove these comments without being limited to doing them 20 at a time or whatever the number is? It seems like I have to each “page” full of garbage comments one at a time…it takes forever…and I have no interest in doing that.

Thanks,
Mike