Boston ? Thus begins another day in the Internet cafe. I arrive at the office, decap my java, turn on the computer, and begin consuming the typical American breakfast: coffee and spam.

On my electronic plate I find the usual fare: several offers to enlarge my penis, an opportunity to lose weight while I sleep, a chance to get a lower mortgage, get out of debt, buy prescription drugs online, all while watching XXX-rated teenagers.

With the only utensil at hand — a plastic delete button — I pick at my food. Fifteen minutes, 138 deletes, one carpal and one tunnel later, I have been tricked into opening three spams and, probably, trashing as many real e-mails with “Hi” in the subject line. Good morning, Spamerica.

In case you didn’t notice, this month marks the silver anniversary of that fateful moment in 1978 when a salesman at Digital Equipment Corp. typed out the first hundred unsolicited sales pitches one address at a time. Today, spam has become cheap, portable and as indigestible as its namesake.

As much as half of all e-mail is spam, clogging the central artery of the electronic communications body. AOL alone blocks up to 2.3 billion spams a day. One Internet service provider pays 12 percent to 15 percent of its gross revenues for anti-spam services. And anti-spammers figure that it’s costing businesses $10 billion a year in time spent riding the delete button.

Indeed in the e-world, spam has now become the real four-letter word, called everything from “pollution” to “the organized crime of the Internet” to “the toxic sea.” We’ve now officially arrived at a tipping point when even techies notorious for wanting the government to keep its hands off the Internet are calling for help.

In just the last few weeks, AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo formed a joint assault on spam. Virginia passed a law that would send a spammer to the slammer. The Federal Trade Commission held a conference that bravely put the spammers and anti-spammers in the same room. And now in Congress, Sen. Charles Schumer announced legislation to create a “do-not-spam” registry, while Rep. Zoe Lofgren wants a law to force labels on spammers and offer bounties to the e-vigilantes who track down the violators.

But in the midst of the cries to do “something,” we are just beginning to decide how to label spam, let alone how to stop it. Most of us define spam the way Justice Potter Stewart defined its most important product, porn: We know it when we see it. The FTC figures that two-thirds of the unsolicited bulk e-mail is deceptive or fraudulent. But what about the other third? Is that spam or marketing?

These are some of the questions facing the lawmakers. Is a legitimate ad in the in-box worse than a flyer in the mailbox? Can you legally ban e-marketing without banning snail-mail marketing? Is it enough to demand a label on any e-pitch with “ADV” and a return address? Or does a frustrated public justify a ban on all unsolicited bulk mail?

Over breakfasts with the delete button, I have come to believe that the most annoying aspect of unwanted bulk mail goes beyond the con and the clutter and the porn. It’s wrapped up in the single word, “unwanted.”

Today, most of us take our personal computers personally. We’ve come to regard an e-mail as being as private as a letter. Spam is less like a flyer coming in the mail slot than a sales pitch crammed into an envelope to a friend.

In the world of instant messages on cell phones and computers, it seems every new technology that makes it easier, cheaper, faster to communicate makes it easier, cheaper, faster for intrusions. So the problem with spam is not just the criminal but the commercial ruin of a personal good thing.

I was in the first class to join the do-not-call list that bumped telemarketers from my dinner table. I’ll be in the first class to sign up for a do-not-spam list to change my breakfast menu. I say that, realizing that it’s going to take an ongoing effort of law and technology to control this electronic pollution.

Here is the view from my steaming breakfast table: Anyone with an in-box is in a battle for control of the private space against a commercial wrecking crew. If Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks were starring in a movie called “You’ve Got Spam” it wouldn’t be a romantic comedy, it would an international thriller. The only plot line is whether we’ll take down the culprits before they take down the system.

Ellen Goodman is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.