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Almost from the minute e-mail became available at the Mighty Houston Chronicle, I tried my best to get my regular contacts to use it instead of the telephone.

This was crucial back in the 1990s, when I was the technology beat reporter covering the huge growth in home PCs and the rise of the Internet. Public relations professionals were aiming dozens of messages at journalists like me, and the phone was their weapon of choice. If I answered my phone every time it rang, I’d never get any work done.

In defense, my voice mail greeting said (and still says) that e-mail is the best way to reach me, and certainly the preferred way to pitch products. I drafted a series of Web pages aimed at PR people, including one that asked them to use e-mail.

Today, I’m no longer covering tech day-to-day, but I still get a lot of PR pitches. Ninety-five percent come through e-mail — the reps who deal with me regularly know that’s what I prefer. The few phone-based pitches I get are either from those who are trying harder to get my attention because I didn’t respond, (hint: I’m probably not interested), or they’ve been given Draconian instructions by micro-managing supervisors or control-freak clients who insist that they use the phone.

Most of the voice mail I receive these days is from print readers who either don’t have or don’t like using e-mail; local business people who are more comfortable using the phone than a computer; or Chronicle co-workers who pick up the phone and dial because voice for them is faster than opening up Outlook and banging out an e-mail.

For the most part, e-mail has replaced voice mail as the primary business communications medium. But voice mail is not dead, despite what Michael Arrington writes on TechCrunch.

But now an increasing number of people are just plain avoiding voicemail (for my impromptu and unscientific survey, see the comments here, which are predominantly anti-voicemail). It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily.

Typical voicemail messages today include things like “Please don’t leave me a voicemail, I rarely listen to them. Please just email me at xxxx@xxxx.com” Many people don’t bother setting up their voicemail accounts at all. Then there’s my favorite method, the one I use personally — let the message box get full and then don’t empty it. Caller ID still tells me who called, and I can simply call them back.

How many times have you called someone back and said “I saw that you called but didn’t listen to the voicemail yet, Is it anything urgent?”

Senders often feel guilty for leaving voicemails, too. And to make sure you get the message, quite often people will follow up with a text message — “Just left you a VM, it’s important” — just so you know it’s there.

While I detest voice mail as much as Arrington, there are times when it is indeed the best tool for the job. It’s good when verbal nuance is required, because even the best-written e-mail can’t convey emotion as well as a human voice (something Arrington allows for later in his entry). It’s also good when you need to “up the bandwidth”. I’ve had instances in which something was better explained to me in a voice-mail message than it was in e-mail.

It’s also best when a voice conversation is required to follow up on a communiqu