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    The Atlantic

    Voicemail Refuses to Die

    In spite of all its limitations—and even because of them—the technology still has a purpose.
    by Caroline Mimbs Nyce May 21, 2023 5 minutes
    Source: Martin Parr / Magnum

    The first ever BlackBerry, released in 1999, came with just five megabytes of storage, or the equivalent of about a single song. That is so small a percentage of the storage offered by top-of-the-line, one-terabyte phones today that you are better off writing it in scientific notation. If its full storage capacity was purposed for music, a modern iPhone or Samsung Galaxy could hold hundreds of thousands of downloaded songs, representing more than 1 million minutes of audio.

    And yet those same phones will sometimes whine that your voicemail is full. Exceed some seemingly mysterious limit, and your inbox shuts down until you go through and prune it. Would-be message leavers are hard-bounced: “The mailbox is full and cannot accept any messages at this time. Goodbye.”

    It feels oddly in tension with the rest of our digital lives. We have been conditioned to expect a kind

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