Bacn Clogging up Inboxes

By Greg McNevin

October 5, 2007: First it was spam, now it’s bacn blasting inboxes. This time, however, there’s no one to blame for the email deluge except those with the clogged inboxes.

Pronounced ‘bacon’, the term was coined at a blog conference in the US earlier this year and has rapidly become the geek-tag de-jour to describe solicited email that is, according to the official bacn website, "e-mail you want. But not right now".

Old newsletter subscriptions, updates from social networking pages such as Facebook and MySpace, electronic bills or receipts and other notifications are the most common and annoying types of bacn, and due to the sheer numbers, it is rapidly turning into somewhat of an inbox menace.

Facebook is a particularly prominent example of bacn, as the social networking site sends out an email notification to a user for many reasons, with varying levels of usefulness. For example every time someone writes on a user’s wall, messages them or adds them as a friend, and email will roll out. For active users this can mean dozens of messages each day from a single source, all which will most likely be perused before being filed or deleted.

Next to spam, bacn is fast becoming the bulkiest section of email pouring into many inboxes, and filters that go beyond traditional measures used in software such as Microsoft Outlook are reportedly already on the way to sort out un-actionable, non-urgent bacn items.

The term itself is also spreading like fallout in the upper atmosphere. Expect it to be in every buzzword lexicon before the year is out.

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