What do you call emails which are not spam — because one did, technically, ask for them when you signed up for some mailing list or other — but which one nevertheless deletes without reading?
As in, “My inbox is half full of spam and half full of ________.”
It seems like a word that we should have.
July 1, 2009 at 5:29 pm
The unofficial word is “BACN” pronounced “bacon” like the meat product. Not as tasty, though. Also, not in widespread use just yet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacn_(electronic)
The nice thing about bacn is that it’s usually more honest. I got rid of most of mine through filtering or unsubscribing from the site.
July 1, 2009 at 5:44 pm
“Bac’n” is one word I’ve heard for that. More “real” than spam, but still not real meaty.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14032271
July 1, 2009 at 5:50 pm
Yeah, Janet’s right. Bacn:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacn_%28electronic%29
July 1, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Flotsam, detritus, dreck?
spam + dreck has a bit of a ring to it
July 1, 2009 at 7:01 pm
These types of emails present an interesting challenge to a bayesian junk filter, such as included in Thunderbird and most anti-spam systems. A typical training regime has you train on classification errors. Bacn is often what ends up being classified as uncertain. So do you train it as spam, or ham? Currently in my JunQuilla extension, I force you to train uncertain messages – but these bacn messages always cause me to squirm when I make the call, and I doubt if I am consistent. Maybe I should just let users call them “bacn” and not confuse the spam filter with inconsistent training. They truly are uncertain status emails.
July 1, 2009 at 8:01 pm
ham
July 1, 2009 at 8:31 pm
Crap? What’s the difference between Junk and Spam?
July 1, 2009 at 9:03 pm
Every suck mailinglist should have a unsubscribe button somewhere in it.
If they do, click it, if they don’t, or ignore our unsubscribe request, it’s spam after all.
July 1, 2009 at 9:16 pm
No. You are all wrong. The word is: schmimmelfriffel.
July 1, 2009 at 11:01 pm
I’m thinking “hotdog”, e.g. not 100% bad but lots of annoying fillers. “Sausage”?
I would rather have a “river of news” kind of interface for mailing lists, I like to scan and read threads here and there. Maybe usenet or webforums are a better answer.
All the auto-generated cronspam and such I like to call “automata” since it seems to develop a life of it’s own..
July 2, 2009 at 12:48 am
I might call them “bulk messages”.
July 2, 2009 at 3:40 am
Well if spam refers to unwanted e-mail…
Let’s go back to snail mail terms for a sec, we all get mail form companies or services we at some point asked for, but no longer want or need. That’s Junk Mail.
So I just refer to that stuff as junkmail, and unsubscribe or even mark it as spam (if I can’t easily unsubscribe) so I don’t have to delete it every other day.
Mostly for me it’s Newegg ads taunting me, and Amazon waving delicious deals under my nose.
July 2, 2009 at 3:42 am
Grey Mail?
July 2, 2009 at 5:08 am
Cruft.
July 2, 2009 at 11:44 am
http://lifehacker.com/291688/how-do-you-handle-bacn
July 2, 2009 at 2:29 pm
We could take dria’s suggestion of spam + dreck, and combine them into “speck”, which is similar to bacon, but different. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speck
July 4, 2009 at 1:40 pm
Spam is sometimes called UCE (unsolicitied commercial email), so presumably what you’re talking about would be SCE (solicited commercial email).
Bacn’s a nicer term though.
July 6, 2009 at 7:03 am
Did you realize that “spam” spelled backwards is “maps?”
Who knew?
yrs–
–Ben
July 12, 2009 at 7:33 am
I always called mine fluff but Bacn sounds better.
I lessened mine by filtering them into topical folders where, if not read in 30 days, they get deleted automatically.
October 28, 2009 at 7:13 pm
[...] pretty cool. I’ll use it even if for no other reason besides its ability to separate the bac’n from the real-human-conversations-that-I-care-about [...]