Me, three years ago: Why on Earth do I need e-mail?

Me, three months ago: Oh, goody — got some e-mail!

Me, three minutes ago: Ugh. More e-mail.

Delete, delete, delete.

If you live a wired life at work or home, chances are you have experienced a similar e-mail evolution. What was once a gimmick for geeks quickly became an incredible convenience and then, just as quickly, a new source of irritation. The reason?

Too many ads. If this keeps up, e-mail may soon go the way of the ringing phone at dinnertime: snarled at and unanswered.

The problem is that unscrupulous marketers are flooding the world’s inboxes with offers of everything stupid, suspicious or sick. When I log on, my inbox looks like the National Enquirer’s classifieds. Do I want a new diet? Boyfriend? Bust? Click here!

Collectively, the stuff is called spam. And because sending a million spams is even cheaper than taking out one measly classified — in fact, it’s practically free — the practice is exploding exponentially.

Already, spam accounts for about 50 percent of all e-mail — up from just 8 percent in 2001. Back in December, America Online boasted that it had blocked half a billion spams from its members in one day.

Now, it routinely blocks a billion. And still, an annoying number get through. On Tuesday, AOL announced yet another lawsuit against spammers — its 100th — proof of the difficulty of spam slamming.

“I’m going crazy wondering why I get all these e-mails about how to get a bigger penis,” says Lonnie (a guy). “Why me? It is clearly going to ruin e-mail if it is not dealt with. I’m going back to carrier pigeons.”

Pigeons might not be the answer, but he’s right: e-mail cannot go on this way. Just as Americans eventually learned to slam the door on Fuller Brush salesmen, toss out junk mail and mute commercials, they will parry this assault as well. It’s just a question of how.

It could be that legislation will be passed to outlaw spam. Or technology may come along that effectively filters it out. But then again, it could be we who change.

Already, legislation has been enacted in California that requires all advertisers to announce themselves by putting “ADV” in the subject heading. But since many spammers operate offshore or can’t be traced, it’s unclear how effective this law — or any law — will be.

Meanwhile, techies are hard at work devising ever newer filters to scan e-mail before it gets to the inbox. But so far, these don’t work perfectly. Some legitimate e-mails get spiked while some sleazy ones get through. “I check my junk folder three times a day to make sure no good ones have gone in there,” says April Mason, a twentysomething businesswoman in Manhattan. And sometimes they have. So the filters have a way to go.

That leaves it to us to change — and we just might. Some folks already have started using two e-mail addresses: One for their inner circle, the other for all their online searches and purchases. That way, they can ignore any messages sent to the second address.

Or it also could be that more and more of us will start accepting e-mails only from friends we have preapproved, the same way some people program their phones to accept calls only from a select list of buddies.

But maybe — just maybe — we will opt out of e-mail entirely. Spam will spoil the medium the way sewage can spoil a lake. We’ll regard the inbox with disgust.

If so, a new technology could spring up to replace e-mail. Or we just may go back to those incredibly hokey methods of communication we’d been so ready to mothball: The phone. The letter. The knock on the door.

— Lenore Skenazy is a columnist for the New York Daily News. Her e-mail address is

lskenazy@edit.nydailynews.com.