Maybe I should clarify.
If you get a combined internet / long distance phone provider, you get a long distance number which can be reached as if it were e-mail. But it is voice-mail.
Then unscrupulous spammers concoct a voice mail message and broadcast it to every available internet long distance voice mail box they can find. You wind up listening to unwanted solicitations in order to find the real messages.
And you thought spam was bad...
That's why I went back to a stand-alone answering machine with a skip button (and a good ComSwitch to direct all the various signals over the phone line).