From spam to bacn

I have learned a new word, though I’m quite familiar with the reality.  From  BBC News – Why your inbox fills with bacn instead of spam:

Bacn is becoming what spam once was – the nuisance that fills up your inbox and makes it hard to pick out the important messages you have to read and which require a reply.

Bacn is all those reminders, newsletters, notifications, limited offers, alerts and other ephemera sent by websites, e-tailers and other services you have used ever since you made your first mouse clicks on the web.

It is called bacn because those messages sit in the middle of a short continuum between what tech folks call spam (fake meat/junk mail) and ham (real meat/real mail). Those messages are bacn because they are not quite real messages but are not quite junk either.

“It’s a problem in as much as it can get in the way of doing your real work,” said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at security firm Sophos. “Some people have signed up for so many newsletters and mailing lists it gets hard to find the essential messages.

“Bacn can be a productivity problem.” he said, adding that it was stuff you probably wanted to read, just not right now.

Cans of spam Bacn is meatier than spam but not as real as ham

Glance at your email inbox and the bacn is easy to spot – and chances are that there will be quite a lot of it. Many webmail providers, notably Gmail and Hotmail, have introduced tools that help people sweep it into a folder that they can look through later.