Can I live without e-mail? No, but the phone's another story

Sometimes I just have to wonder if the benefits of the Internet are worth the hassles. It seems that every new development that makes it more useful is quickly subverted into something bothersome, if not downright dangerous.

A message from reader Lee Flatt this week deflated my hopeful enthusiasm for VoIP, a rapidly spreading technology that lets you use the Internet to make telephone calls. VoIP, short for "voice over Internet protocol," promises to cost less than traditional phone service, especially for international calls. Before I've even had a chance to try it out, here comes the news that already it is being turned against us. Internetnews.com reports that telephone solicitors are moving offshore and using cheap VoIP to get around the U.S. Do Not Call list. So now not only can they bother us with sales calls, they can do it at a cut rate.

"If you thought spam was bad, you ain't seen nothing yet," one analyst said in the internetnews.com interview. He speculated that a business or household could get as many as 150 calls a day. And remember, this is from people using VoIP to call you on your regular phone. Whether or not you use VoIP will have nothing to do with it.

As if on cue, I've begun receiving telephone sales calls again. Probably unrelated, but as irritating as ever. "Doesn't your company abide by the federal Do Not Call law," I asked one caller. "I was unaware of that law, but I'll check into it," was the assuredly untruthful response.

It makes me want to yank out the phone line. I don't much like talking on the phone, anyway. I greatly prefer to use e-mail or instant messaging, now that I've reached a coping level with my spam. I forward my e-mail around to several different addresses, and among them, the various spam filters catch most of it.

The last time I swore off e-mail, it didn't last a day. About the only way I can get away from it is to leave the country, and even then an Internet café is always less than a day away.

I considered giving it up again this week, when a comment in a radio interview caught my attention. Donald Knuth, known as the "founding artist of computer science," was interviewed for National Public Radio's Morning Edition. Knuth, an efficiency expert with a love of programming, has been working on a seven-volume series of books, "The Art of Computer Science" since 1962. He's a fascinating guy, but it was this statement by the interviewer that really made me take notice:

"Knuth long ago gave up e-mail. It was too much of a distraction. He moves in general with a kind of steady urgency that seems to say, 'My time on Earth is limited and there is much to do.'"

Isn't that true of all of us? Perhaps we should dispense with e-mail and be done with spam forever. If the guy who's writing the book on computer programming can do without it, surely we can too.

However, when I visited Knuth's Web site , I found that while he personally does not use e-mail, he employs a secretary who sorts his mail, including messages from two e-mail accounts. These accounts are specifically for reporting errors in his books, and if the secretary prints out any superfluous messages, he uses them for scratch paper.

Well, I'm not going to hire a secretary to sort through my spam, so clearly I'm not about to give up e-mail. But if anybody figures out a good way to get along without a telephone, I want to know about it.