Although even today I still have a "house phone", I haven't used a POTS land line in 15 years or more - I switched to VoIP long ago because of related nuisances

Although even today I still have a "house phone", I haven't used a POTS land line in 15 years or more - I switched to VoIP long ago because of related nuisances. The straw that broke the camel's back was that somebody had their fax machine to send something to a (wrong) number every night at 2am. The phone company said they had no way to just block that number for us, but that for abusive calls we could talk to the police. The police said they couldn't do anything because although it was an extreme nuisance, it didn't fit the legal definition of abusive. Since we were going to have to change our number because of this anyway, we decided to just move to a platform with which we really could manage blacklists and such. A prior experience had a debt collection agency calling us a couple of times a week, asking for some guy we never heard of. Each time we'd tell them that this was a wrong number, but they'd just call back a couple days later anyway. I tried using logic: the person they were looking for apparently had a Florida address, while the number they were calling at was a NJ number (back when you could pretty definitively link phone numbers to geography). The guy calling us agreed that it didn't make sense, but that didn't matter. I finally told them that the guy was deceased, and oddly, they seemed to buy that. Anyway, my experience suggests that the demise of land lines has been not just because of the nuisance itself, but also because the technology and regulatory situation didn't allow people any effective way to deal with it. Makes me wonder what that will eventually mean to email, SMS, etc., if anything. EDIT: my current solution for spam calls on our VoIP line is three-pronged. 1) Known abusers are blacklisted, never to be heard from again. I don't really use this, though, because they're probably just spoofing the number anyway. 2) Everybody on my contact list can freely ring our phone, no problem. 2) Otherwise, the call is intercepted by a voice response system. It just tells them that if they want to talk to us, to push "2". Bots never do that, so we're very nearly 100% free of spam calls.