What? Wait a second!we’ve heard of spam (and dread it) but what is this bacn you speak of?
Mmm bacon (a la Homer Simpson). Nope, not that kind!
Bacn, as described by Wikipedia, is all that email that you have signed up for (think: countless newsletters that seemed necessary at the time) but are often not read by you for a long period of time.
Basically, it’s email that you want but not at the moment.
So all those LinkedIn Discussion Updates, Facebook Notifications (‘Jimmy commented on your comment!’ Who the heck is Jimmy?), Twitter follow notifications, periodic messages from vendors you have purchased from and countless others are all a form of bacn.
So bacn is spam then, right?
Well, not necessarily.
Bacn is not unsolicited (because you did sign up for it at some point in time) and not necessarily sent in bulk.
So where does Bacn come from? It was a term that was coined to mean, ‘Better than spam, but not as good as personal email.’
How can you cut back on the Bacn and keep the ham (the good email)?
I would suggest creating a separate email to sign up for newsletters, online purchases, etc., to separate the bacn from the good stuff.
Alternatively, you can create rules so that the bacn can be hidden away until you are ready to deal with it.
Or, like most people, just dig through the bacn and spam to get to the real mail.
Like ‘velveeta’ years ago, ‘bacn’ is one of those silly terms that changes definition every few years yet never really catches on.
I doubt spam would be called spam if it were being named now; the time for cutesy terms is long over.