And who would ignore such a thing? On the same principle that Western Union followed when it placed a picture of a telegram in a newspaper and challenged readers to ignore the message, a telex or an SMS rarely goes unread.

So telex has a rich world role too: It's a good way of getting through the incoming-mail filters that more and more busy people need to employ.

Spam, sent laboriously, in a way inconvenient to the sender, is not spam.

An e-mail from someone unknown? Virtual trash can. A fax from someone unknown? Real-world trash can. A telex from someone unknown? Someone sent me a telex? People still use those? I have to see this.

Recently, I sent a telex to a colleague at a German publishing firm. Later, he described his amazement upon receiving the telex sent down to his floor from some forgotten technical backroom in a dusty corner of his building. "I thought our office got rid of telexes years ago!" he told me in wonderment.

Of course, gateways linking clunky teleprinters to trendy mobile phones will eventually soil this spam-free Eden of messaging innocence. But all devices have the right to speak to each other, if only for the sake of symmetry and neatness.

But perhaps the real explanation for telex's tenacity is a dusty old protocol in the rulebooks of the International Telecommunication Union.

According to Telexnet, a supplier of e-mail-to-telex software, "Telex still remains the only legally recognised form of data transmission."

What makes telex the only legitimate mode of communication for thousands of diplomats, lawyers and other international paper pushers? The answerback code. When it comes to official business, people need to know for sure that messages reached their destination. Like the equally underutilized registered letter, the telex may have a firm place among our growing media options.

Technologies only a little deader than telex have a powerful appeal for aficionados of the poignantly obsolete, the Dead Media List.

They've been nibbling round the edges of telex for a long time. Pictures-by-telex, home telegraphs, the telegram boy -- media bygones like these are arcane enough to have received a proper goodbye from information technology's museumologists. But telex hasn't joined the ranks of the obsolete yet.

But one does have to wonder if a Dead Media obituary for this predecessor to the Internet is imminent.

Dead Media's founding necronaut, Bruce Sterling, is careful not to sound the death knell too soon, highlighting quaint survivals: the French Army's still-functional messenger-pigeon unit, or Prague's fully operating citywide network of pneumatic postal tubes. We may not need telex as much as we used to, but that doesn't stop us from taking it out of the closet every now and then. If the Dead Media hearse hasn't yet come to take telex away, perhaps we ought to give it another chance at greatness.

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