Going back to work after a long and leisurely vacation has always been difficult, what with all the niggling office odds and ends that tend to build up in your absence, but nothing says the lazy days are over quite like the mountain of junk e-mail that infiltrates your computer while you’re away.

Monday morning, with the pleasant roar of the New Jersey surf still singing in my ears, I opened my in-box to find that the miserable spammers had been working overtime while I was gone. Of the nearly 100 e-mails that begged my attention, 90 percent were unsolicited ads that sent me into a carpal-tunnel-inducing frenzy of deletion and left me wondering whether e-mail was a technological marvel or a largely unnecessary modern nuisance that threatens to drive us all back to pens and paper one day.

My voluminous batch of e-mailers included the familiar culprits, of course, who make it a point to check in with me a couple of times a day to see if I’m ready to experience “wild sexual fulfillment” by enlarging both my male anatomy and my breasts. Then there was the standard slew of low-rate mortgage lenders, discount drug purveyors and diploma mills that offered the college degree of my choice without even having to take a test or write a single term paper. An e-mail marked “final notification” informed me that I’d won more than $3 million in the Global Lottery International, whatever that is, and that I should hurry and call a man in Madrid and provide him with all my pertinent bank account information so he could deposit my winnings. Other far-flung benefactors were also well represented, from Africans to Iraqis, each of them eager to make me wealthy if I agreed to help secrete millions out of their war-torn countries. A woman named Inge Knutson urged me to not neglect my libido, and even sent along some really raunchy photos to help me visualize her pitch.

One e-mail contained a fascinating and utterly cryptic come-on that read, “Blurt approximant placid sheath eggshell seriatim explosion cretan rackety care debauch invocate chamomile,” which made me curious about what exactly I was being asked to buy. After clicking one after another of these moronic missives into oblivion, I was left with an aching index finger and a nagging question: Don’t we have laws at the state and federal levels that are supposed to relieve us of this burdensome and time-consuming irritation known as spam?

Last year in Maine, you might remember, legislators finally passed a law requiring that all unsolicited e-mail advertisements carry “ADV” in the subject line or “ADV:ADLT” if the e-mail contained material not suitable for people under 18. Yet not a single one my dozens of correspondents had bothered to comply with the law, suggesting that these cyber-pests are either reckless enough to risk prosecution and fines or savvy enough to know that there isn’t a law on the books that can effectively stop them from turning this innovative form of communication into an electronic Pandora’s box of bothersome and wasteful clutter.

In February, the Federal Trade Commission reported that while it receives 300,000 spam complaints every day, no one had ever been charged with breaking the so-called CAN-SPAM law, which provides jail time and fines up to $2 million for violations.

Clearly, the spammers have won the opening battle of the e-mail war, and that’s one fatal error message that cannot be ignored.