Facebook replaces non-Facebook mail addresses on Timeline Over the weekend Mark Zuckerberg's recently floated company began quietly displaying @Facebook email addresses on all of its users' Timelines. The move immediately sparked anger from Facebookers, who complained that their third party email account names – such as Gmail or Hotmail – had been unceremoniously replaced without …
Also, I'm sure FB would be very happy to allow you to export all your contacts from FB under the form of <contact>@facebook.com . It allows external apps / sites to pull some info from it, but ultimately it's encouraging the use of @facebook.com emails and driving more traffic to it's own site.
It also makes sense to integrate Facebook messages with email, phones have been doing this for ages (also with Twitter feeds, sms etc). It makes sense that a message is a message irrespective of delivery mechanism, and I'm sure the user can always sort them out if they want to.
So, yeah, not impressed by FB being pushy and secretive about this, but no surprise either, and frankly I think the majority of their users will welcome it
And no mention in the article of how to change it back (if you wanted to for whatever reason).
In the email settings there's an option to hide from timeline, which has been set on all non fb email addresses, easy to change back if you're that way inclined.
Still, they shouldn't have blanket changed everyone's settings without notification anyway.
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Why in an article about Facebook is there always has to be someone who puts in the time and effort to tell the world he doesn't use Facebook rather than just not reading the supposedly irrelevant article. The same with Twitter/Windows/OSX/iPhone/iPad/Android/Blackberry/Phone 7/BBC/Sky/ITV/etc.
I mean, if I read news or reviews of a Ford Mondeo there isn't anyone who posts just to point out they don't drive one.
Why in an article about Facebook is there always has to be someone who puts in the time and effort to tell the world he doesn't use Facebook rather than just not reading the supposedly irrelevant article.
It's educational and they are leading by example.
So where does the @facebook.com address deliver to? I've found it: Messages
Now that I've disabled it, messages from anyone else get bounced with, "Based on the email preferences of the person you're trying to email, this message could not be delivered."
It's arrogance: Zuckerberk can't imagine that some people don't stay logged into facebook all the time, or might, in fact, go days without visiting.
"I imagine it's covered in the Ts and Cs"
Just because it is covered in the T&Cs does not mean that it is enforceable. The terms and conditions must be reasonable, or else they are invalid. For example, there is a clause buried in the T&C's that by signing up you are giving up your first born child and also your liver for a live liver transplant, this would be ruled as invalid due to being unreasonable or unfair. Should someone feel strongly enough about this issue, they could have it tested in court, even if it was in the T&Cs.
Sadly, in order to point out such a clause is unfair/unreasonable, you would need to call a lawyer, thereby enriching not just your lawyer, but the defending company's lawyer as well. Oh well, such is life.
Personally I don't see what the fuss is about, could be considered a useful security feature as it allows Facebook friends to send you emails without publishing a 'real' email address.
My Facebook page is totally open to all as I only post information I want made public and don't trust Zuckerberg et al to keep anything private ;). So this just gives me another 'burn email' to use on sites I suspect of selling to spammers.
It's not a problem until you need to get in touch with someone, their phone isn't working, they rarely check facebook and the email address they once had listed on facebook is gone without their knowledge, replaced with an email address they rarely check (i.e. facebook).
I thought this social networking thing was supposed to facilitate communication, not hinder it.
i assume zuck and friends have got a fairly impressive spam filter built in, otherwise it will quickly become pointless as most people will turn it off.
If the spam filter works fine then I have absolutely no problem with this currently.
However, my concern would be that this is an attempt at a kind of walled garden and way of limiting ways facebook users communicate. Once they've removed other methods of communicating surely the next logical step is for them to try to begin to charge for messaging?
...the emails sent to the address are turned into Facebook messages... you don't have to use the facebook email address you can use your current one. But it's just not displayed by default now.
In the grand scheme of things, this is a non-news item...made news by silly people moaning about changes to a social network you don't have to fund your usage of with cold hard cash.
I'm not sure that you get it. Suddenly everyone on FB has an easily guessed pseudo* email address. This makes it a huge spam magnet. FB have also in their infinite wisdom put this as the default display on all users profiles, even for those who have chosen not to show any email address at all, replacing anyone's real email address that was previously displayed. Now suddenly people may find that instead of getting emails sent to their real email they end up in FB messages instead. This is 5 star arrogance.
*pseudo because it delivers to FB Messages instead of an actual real email account.
I guess I'm still missing the point of the brouhaha.
You've had an @facebook.com address since you signed up for Facebook all those years ago. Any spammer worth a sh¡t (granted this qualifier would exclude 99% of them) should have already been spamming this email address. I haven't seen any spam in the Messages. None.
I just checked my email addresses in Facebook. The Facebook.com address is NOT my primary address, in contradiction to this report.
Sounds like more bitching just to be bitching.
From what I can tell this is really all about money. Facebook's market value is currently just shy of $70bn and yet as I wrote around the time they have very little to support that valuation. As such they need to massively increase their revenues which means driving as much traffic into the site as possible.
My solution is to use an ad-blocker when I have to use facebook to stay in touch with my foreign relatives and to use it less otherwise. The funny thing being that my social life is no better or worse without facebook than with it, which only seems to prove that it's a load of rubbish anyway!
Amazing... thought Andriod was so popular... yet no-one seems to have noticed the FAR WORSE action facebook did. On an Andriod phone, they have replaced the primary email address of all your facebook friends with the new facebook email instead.
I'm glad I'm not on facebook, and I don't have a "smart" phone either, but my friend was absolutely livid over this.
Perfectly targeted at facebook users like me.
The only reason I have a facebook account is to display my contact details, especially my e-mail, on my facebook profile so that people I know who are into facebook can contact me.
I only ever log in to accept friend requests.
I only ever accept friend requests from people I know so that they will have a way to find my e-mail address which is on my profile.
I suspect I am not the only one who uses facebook in this way.
I bet there are a few people who, having not been notified of this will have not changed their e-mail back, and will miss some very important messages due to this complete wankiness. Facebook really don't give a shit about their users, sorry, victims.
Grrrrr.
Same here, I just needed some info. Really didn't want an FB account but I wanted to find out what my favourite underground bands were up to, gig dates, music releases, etc.
Mr Zuck has my nickname, my proper email, an incorrect DOB and a mobile phone number. The mobile number is on a crappy £20 phone and PAYG thing I got for when I go to gigs, in case the phone gets stolen. He's not getting my "real" day-to-day mobile.
I've no problem with the FB e-mail address as such. It links to my messages and e-mails are not accepted from anyone who isn't already allowed to message me. So no spam issues.
What definitely is not right is the fact that this easily guessable e-mail address also serves as a username when logging in (and this can't be stopped), thus reducing what was already weak security to a really shit level.
Pretty stupid decision, as I have my email POP'd into my phone and computer, so instantly Facebook cuts out that method of communication (not that anybody emails me anyway...).
So thanks to El Reg pointing this out, I go to my profile and edit it to display my original address and not display the facebook one. Now should anybody bother to contact me in this manner, it'll not go into some black hole pit of despair (etc).
.
It seems to me that Web2.0 companies just don't get how people can and want to use off-line interfaces. I recently had a phishing attempt claiming to be from Yahoo! so I thought it might be good to inform Yahoo!. But could I? All their help seems to assume you are using webmail where clicking the "spam" button does stuff. I asked for help (namely "is there an abuse@yahoo.com address?) and received a reply pointing me to...the same not-so-helpful help document.
So in this instance, I don't anticipate Facebook to support POP3 or IMAP so I have little interest. I guess it is a nice idea to make to accessible to outside users if you're into the whole social networking thing. I'm not, so if you don't mind, I'll put my working address back into use, thank you Facebook...
It fell into the trap of every successful internet firm - it wants to dominate the web.
Unfortunately, as AOL demonstrated, nobody wants you to dominate the web. It's a web, it doesn't need a front door, SSO, centralised anything, single billing platform, single messaging system, etc, etc, etc, etc.
There's a very long list of companies that have fallen for this.
So there are no surprises here. Just the usual joker who got lucky with an idea once, but goes on to demonstrate they have no vision.
Everyone knows what the Internet needs don't they, they use it every day?
But facebook mail is so efficient, the internet needs more of it. [sarcasm]
It was great when one of their SMTP's was spitting out a looping fireball of email to one customer address, 10 per second, for days and there was no postmaster services at Facebook to try to report their issue. Eventually it switched over to another IP address, and weeks after it started it stopped.
Because your have to be an idiot to use timeline to gain an email address to get hold of your supposed best friend. Must be a sad life when the only form of getting hold of your 100K best friends is to search their timeline for their email.....
not sure why people find this so bad. you are using their service and not paying you can complain when you start paying for it.
If FB changed their logo colour is that something you have a say in? As someone who works for a company I know as a consumer you use their service on their terms....
Thumbs up because I like seeing how up in arms people get when something so small in their life changes while simultaneously complaining its not changing enough.
Not only have they provided me with an e-mail address I don't want or need but it's impossible to delete it from my list of e-mail addresses associated with my FB account. Undoubtedly this is all covered in the T&C's for FB but that won't stop me mailing a turd a week to Zuckerberg (much more effective in making a point than some DDoS attack).
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