The Facebook Email Mess Gets Even Messier

A few weeks ago, we reported that Facebook had changed everyone’s default email address. Now if only the mess stopped there and didn’t get any worse…

(Source: Kairay Media)

Recently, Facebook unveiled a brand new unified email program. They went ahead and changed all the default email addresses while no one was looking in an effort to boost their Facebook email program, which failed in the past. (For obvious reasons, most people do not want a Facebook email address.) While everyone thought that the problem would be fixed by simply switching back to their default email address, many are now realizing that this change has caused a series of unwanted problems – namely a change to email address books. And because no one realized this, no one saw the change and are being hit unexpectedly by not receiving emails and not getting emails to recipients.

Numerous Facebook users are now reporting that the Facebook-forced email address has changed their address books, causing them to lose emails. Contact email addresses stored on personal devices and phones are being altered without the consent of the user.

Rachel Luxemburg, an employee at Adobe wrote on her personal blog:

Today a co-worker discovered that his contact info for me had been silently updated to overwrite my work email address with my Facebook email address. He discovered this only after sending work emails to the wrong address. And even worse, the emails are not actually in my Facebook messages. I checked. They’ve vanished into the ether.

Luxemburg goes on to explain that this occurred even AFTER she changed the “@Facebook.com” address back to her original email address listed on Facebook.

Many people are waking up to realize this problem. A post on Hacker News stated:

This morning my mother was complaining that many of the email addresses in her Droid Razr contacts had been replaced with Facebook ones. It would seem the Facebook app has been populating her address book with emails and contact photos, and decided to migrate all her Facebook-using contact over to this convenient new system.”

But one wonders just how “convenient” this system is as many of these email addresses are considered to be incorrect and more of a pain then a present from the “lovely” people over at Facebook headquarters.

This is not a little “boo-boo” but rather a very problematic situation that can have grave results if people are not getting the emails being sent to them.

At Walyou, we want you to do us a favor, check any of your software programs or apps that sync address books and contacts with Facebook, including phones, devices, home computers, and iOS 6, and change your settings…STAT.

(Via: CNET)