Facebook Forces New Email Address on Users


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Facebook just gave out new @facebook.com email address to anyone who had not previously signed up for the service, which includes me.
The email address, which looks like a string of numbers and "@facebook.com" at the end until you customize it with something better, shows up by default on your Facebook page or Timeline publicly.
Want to delete it? You can't!
All you can do is change the settings to make the new email address hidden from Timeline or your Facebook page, or visible only to you. The inability to remove it riled me up, to say the least.
So what is this email address, really, and where does mail sent to it go? I fired off a quick test message and dug through some of Facebook's help guides to figure it out. There's both good and bad news in what I found.
What is the New Facebook Email Address and Where Does It Go?Messages sent to your newly mandated @facebook.com email address only pop up in your Facebook messages account. They don't redirect to another email address (unless you've created rules for Facebook messages to be forwarded to another account, that is). That's the good news. You don't have a new email account, just a new way for people to put messages in your existing Facebook messages account.
The bad news, however, is that the email address is published publicly, and you have almost no control over who sends you a message. In Facebook's overly complicated privacy settings, you can adjust the controls over who is allowed to send you messages via Facebook; but now anyone with an email address can get a message in front of you. It opens a huge can of worms. How do you control spam, or more importantly, how is Facebook controlling spam? What if Facebook thinks a message coming in from an outside email system is spam but it's not?
How to Make Your Voice HeardThe real problem is that Facebook has once again made a significant change without informing its users of any of this: not the big picture, not the details (where the devil reportedly is), frankly not at all.
I plan to spend the rest of my evening deciding whether to keep a Facebook account. In all likelihood, I'll keep the account because I do reap value from connecting with others through the social network, but I'll strip out virtually everything. No more "likes." No more photos. No more third-party apps. Remember that Facebook isn't really "free" but you decide what you pay for it, and the price is directly related to the amount of activity you do on the site. If you want to keep your Facebook account but are fed up with how Facebook pushes major changes without informing its users, I suggest you pare down your account to its bare bones, too.

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