Awhile back, it seemed that everyone (relatively speaking) was talking, for a day or two, about Bacn, the problem you didn’t know you had with the name you don’t want to use.
Bacn, apparently, is the huge new problem caused by the number of emails you get daily from services like twitter, facebook, myspace, etc, which are notifications you actually do want to know about (ergo not spam), but which are still an annoyance to have filling up your inbox.
The nice thing is, if you use Gmail, a solution has existed for this for well over a year.
The problem, to reiterate, is:
- you (presumably) do want to know about these notifications
- you don’t want them in your inbox
My solution assumes Gmail, and that you are already using an RSS reader of some sort.
- Create a Label in Gmail called “Bacn”
- Set up a filter for any incoming notifications, such as anything from “facebook.com” (for example), or notifications from Basecamp, to be automatically labelled “bacn,” and then automatically archived.
- Add the feed https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/bacn/ to your RSS reader.
Voila; you can now get notified via RSS when your “bacn” comes in, but it won’t clutter up your inbox.
For this to work, your RSS aggregator must support HTTP authentication. Unfortunately, while writing this I discovered that Google Reader does not (yet) support this. In other words, you can’t read Gmail’s atom feeds with Google’s own feed reader. Yes, I think it’s retarded, too. Bloglines will work, if you’re comfortable entering the feed url as “https://username:password@mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom/bacn”.
Alternatively, you could try what I’m contemplating: set up MagpieRSS to read your Gmail feed and then write a PHP script to parse the result back into a public ATOM or RSS feed, and then read that feed in Google Reader. Yes, that’s a little crazy, but it’s a way to get these out of my inbox without them falling off the radar completely.
