Why your inbox fills with bacn instead of spam

[cronus]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21830739

Why your inbox fills with bacn instead of spam

It might be heresy for some to say this, but not all bacon is welcome. Especially when we are talking bacn rather than bacon. One is all the not-quite-junk mail messages that land in your inbox and the other is the tasty stuff that sits happily alongside sausages, fried bread and the other cast members of the full English breakfast.

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.

(continued)

[Gawdzilla Sama]

And the poor man never gets credit for writing Hamlet either.

[cronus]

And the poor man never gets credit for writing Hamlet either.

Mostly cheese in my inbox...they never mention the oversupply of cheese though do they?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

And the poor man never gets credit for writing Hamlet either.

Mostly cheese in my inbox...they never mention the oversupply of cheese though do they?

The news is out there, but it keeps getting clogged up in the pipeline.