One day Yasser Arafat’s widow sent an e-mail, asking for my help in a financial matter. So that took some time to sort out.

But it’s not the demands placed by individual pieces of e-mail that are gradually reducing my will to live. It’s the volume. In the newspaper business, we don’t filter out much incoming e-mail, so I would tell aspiring young journalists that the most valuable skills now are the dexterity to reach the delete button and the strength to push it. In the span of a week, I kill more than a thousand messages, most of them pure spam. I don’t mean to be overly dramatic, but that’s an awful lot of time I could have spent staring out the window at trains.

The advent of e-mail created a fantastic world in which newly empowered human beings everywhere can, without interference from the government or anyone else, instantly exchange unwanted and inaccurate information.

Like any new technology, it immediately attracted the wrong crowd. Not wackos, exactly, but that subset that has made America what it is today: entrepreneurial wackos. In the snail-mail era, it was always fun to receive a single-spaced, typed letter to the editor that went on for five or six pages about some international conspiracy. It was usually entertaining, often creative, and it covered up those unpleasant management memos on the bulletin board. Most important, the writer never had anything to sell. It was a simple, though obviously disturbed, time.

Now, working at a computer is like sitting one foot away from the world’s most annoying salesman.

I understand the temptation presented by a worldwide system that allows you to send millions of e-mails at no cost, in the hope that you’ll connect with one sucker a day. But here at the receiving end of the pipe, the sewage is waist-deep and rising. Let’s pull on some latex gloves, adjust our breathing masks, and go through a few of them.

Here’s one employing the theory that no filter in the universe is set to block the subject line “cadelamquga.” Which is probably true. If you open it, you find an impressive, confidence-inspiring pitch: “Do you require prescription medication on this internet.” And it’s not from just anybody; it’s from Dr. Charles Applegate. I mean, if you can’t trust a guy who makes up a name with “Dr.” in front of it, who can you trust?

Don’t click on the link, the experts tell me, so we’ll just take a wild guess about what kind of medication Ol’ Doc Applegate has for sale.

I wonder if it’s anything like what’s available in the CtALels message. The word in the subject line, which appears to have been typed during a traffic accident, makes you think of a certain product. But when you click to the message, you get “dawn came pale through the crack of the door” and then some stuff about a flying dragon. Even Hugh Hefner was never that enigmatic.

Sometimes the subject line is “got arrested again” and the offer is for a loan of up to $488,000. I wonder how many people see that and think, “Sounds good!”

Some messages want to sell me stocks and some want to sell me software. The stock offers are usually devious, with bizarre subject lines like “italics thoughtful” or “howl volatile.” The software folks tend to be straightforward, and I appreciate that. They send it, I kill it, and life goes on.

But it would be even nicer not to receive them at all.

All these years, we never appreciated how much we relied on one simple, fundamental principle to keep our lives bearable: Stamps cost money.