We Need a Turkey Bacon Filter

We all get them in our inboxes:  

• Send this message to 5 more people or you will have bad luck!
• If you don't send this message on, you are unamerican!
• Send this to all your truest friends, even the person who sent it to you!  

I often call this type of emaill "Turkey Bacon", building, of course, on the idea of Spam.  (Bacon, then, would be the mail you want to receive, what I call "Actionable email.")  Turkey Bacon is basically mail that isn't Spam because it comes from people you want to hear from, but it's not what you want to see from them.  Sure, I want to hear from my friends, but by now they all know that I don't forward those emails.  I almost always immediately delete them.  If it contains an Urban Legend, I send the Snopes link back to the sender to let them know they are spreading misinformation.  

Why can't this be automated?  We can detect spam.  Why can't we detect turkey bacon and deal with it automatically?  How would that be done?  Well, we can use content filtering, of course, like we do with Spam.  But a better solution might be to set up some type of universal database that every email program can check.  A message could then be flagged and the user can then decide how the email program reacts.  (For example, auto delete, or send an auto response, or whatever.)  

I've just had enough of the Turkey Bacon.  It's worse than app spam on Facebook.  Turkey bacon can be a huge time sink if you let it.  I'd really like it if I didn't have to deal with it anymore.  

Oh, and besides Spam, Turkey Bacon, and Bacon, I have another type of email:  Turkey Pastrami.  Turkey Pastrami is that stuff you sign up for (sale notifications, social network notifications, software update information, newsletters, etc), but don't necessarily have to deal with right away.  That stuff is very easily filtered based on source, so there's no issue there, and I hardly ever see those types of emails unless I have free time to check out the gmail label that Turkey Pastrami gets filtered into.  

Posted via email from dOgBOi's posterous