Move over bacn!

I’m loving the meat based terminology for e-mails these days:

• Ham: e-mail, sometimes unexpected, that you legitimately want to receive
• Bacn: e-mail you want, but not right now
• Spam: unsolicited e-mail that you don’t want

Obviously none of us wants the spam. I admit that it’s a source of laughs and sometimes it’s cool to see the clever ways they try, and sometimes succeed, in making it look like a legit message. But I have to admit, that aside from performing the occasional “select all & delete,” I never see the spam messages anymore. I do get the odd spam comments at my blog, but my plug-ins usually catch those and delete them on a regular basis without my involvement.

It’s the bacn that I’m now waging a war against. I’m not really sure what brought this on, but I suspect it’s the “holiday season.” I am getting inundated with e-mails that I’ve signed up for, sure, but are just begging me to shop ’til my mouse drops and buy buy buy! Amazon is insisting that I must want to buy product Z because I’ve expressed interest in products X and Y. Carnival keeps telling me that the perfect time to book another cruise is right now! (it’s been right now ever since my last cruise) Cooking.com, Linens N Things, Old Navy, Apple/iTunes and just about anyone else that I might have made a single purchase from in the past is sending me e-mail on a nearly daily basis. I am not typically an e-mail deleter, but this has driven me nuts to the point where I not only delete the current message, but I perform a search to find every single message from the retailer that wasn’t an order confirmation and trash it, then go a step further to find unsubscribe information and remove myself from their sights altogether — or so they assure me.

There’s still some bacn that I want, of course. To borrow from a foodie phrase, “bacon makes everything better!” And sometimes it does, newsletters about movies, music, restaurants and events around town are wonderful because they’re just informing, not begging. Keeping track with news updates from various papers is great since I never watch televised news and the e-mails from America’s Test Kitchen with tips and tricks (and the occasional solicitation) are good things to have. But starting last night, I have been removing myself from the store lists, turning off subscriptions to deals, and in one e-tailers case that didn’t have any such options, setting their e-mails to bounce back to sender. I’m finding that I rather like having the total in my bank grow as a result of not shopping so darn much, those funds would be much better applied to working down my debts and putting money away into savings. From here on out, I’m just saying no to bacn.

I realize that this move will effectively empty out my Inbox, which is a good thing. And since people don’t seem to want to use e-mail for communication anymore, about the only ham I should get is about one or two messages a week from my mother. 😛