Ditch the Bacn, get the email you want.
Wednesday, May 27th, 2009
The term ‘Bacn‘ has been around for a couple of years to refer to, according to wikipedia:
electronic messages which have been subscribed to and are therefore not unsolicited but are often unread by the recipient for a long period of time, if at all. Bacn has been described as “email you want but not right now.”[1][2]
Bacn differs from spam in that the emails are not unsolicited: the recipient has somehow signed up to receive it. Bacn is also not necessarily sent in bulk. Bacn derives its name from the idea that it is “better than spam, but not as good as a personal email”
Bacn is, generally, non-urgent, not terribly exciting, but may still be information that you want and need.
So we’ve got Spam, Bacn, and then email that actually matters– personal email from one person to another (you!). I’ll call that chops. So, how do you keep current on your chops without getting distracted by the spam and bacn?
At Hotchkiss Consulting we use Google Apps to manage our email, and it does a great job of removing the Spam. But I can’t stand when I’m in the middle of a project and I get distracted by the constant inflow of Bacn, so I decided to get rid of it! Since Google Apps is built on the Gmail core, these instructions should work for any gmail user. Feel free to modify to fit your needs! (more…)
