Bacn is “email you want, just not right now,” as opposed to spam, which everyone knows is email you don’t want at all. It is meant to describe the emails that are all the various notifications from, for example, social networking sites (You have a new Facebook messages, etc, etc) which you, supposedly, do want to know about, but which do wind up being just so much more detritus in the inbox.
I take it there’s considerable debate whether a term is needed for this, um, phenomenon. There’s also probably been so much debate in such a short amount of time that it will not surprise me if the term sticks, at least for some time. Any attempt to deliberately coin a different term at this point will probably just seem contrived, so we may just be stuck with bacn.
