Facebook Forces New Email Address on Users

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.

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?

Originally, By Jill Duffy,PCMAG