Everyone hates it

Everyone hates it—the junk mail that bogs down your mailbox when you arrive home from work full of advertisements that really don’t apply to you, stuffed to the brim with ads for a dollar off this and that.

You just want to walk in the door, leave work behind and sit down to check your e-mail. Then they appear: the inevitable spam e-mails that somehow seemed to slip by your filter and into your inbox. Annoyed, you select delete. Tired of filtering and wondering why you even bothered to open your e-mail, you move on to check you voicemails from the day—after all, this is where the real connection is.

First message, dead air—five whole minutes of it—left by an unknown number, of course. Second message, Aunt Sally calling to tell you that dinner is at her house in three weeks—a 10-minute message. Last message, a telemarketer reminding you this is your last chance to sign up for something you don’t want.

How do you get to the bottom of all this? Many phones now have capabilities allowing visual voicemail applications that allow you to view the voicemail’s transcript or view the voicemail to hit play/fast-forward (basically getting straight to the point) so you can delete it as soon as you’ve seen or heard what you want to.