Facebook Changed Everyone’s Email to @Facebook.com; Here’s How to Fix It

[app103]

Sophos seems to agree with me about the spam, but I have given it a bit more thought and there is more than one Facebook feature to be exploited here and it will probably result in highly targeted spam, as I describe here: http://cranialsoup.b...edible-targeted.html

[TaoPhoenix]

Just a heads-up, courtesy of Lifehacker:

-IainB (June 25, 2012, 09:05 PM)

Drifting a little off topic, I like to go a little earlier in a news source, trying to get an earlier copy rather than an echo unless the echo copy has new info.

Lifehacker got it from Forbes, and Forbes got it from Gervase Markham.
http://blog.gerv.net...facebook-email-mitm/

[IainB]

Lifehacker got it from Forbes, and Forbes got it from Gervase Markham.
http://blog.gerv.net...facebook-email-mitm/

-TaoPhoenix (June 27, 2012, 06:52 AM)

Yes, both provide interesting links/discussions. Well worth a read.

[justice]

From Gervase Markham's story:

The email instead goes to my Facebook inbox, and I don't get a notification email to say it's there.

So this is why Facebook introduced it: They want you to go to their site to check for email. They don't want to send the messages to your email and have you interact there, they don't want you to use a search engine to find content, and they don't want you to use forums and instant messages to talk to people. They don't want you ever to get the idea to leave the site.

[mouser]

Finally someone explained to me wtf this whole thing was actually about, thank you.

Since it's such a short explanation let's just recap it here:

I prefer email to social media. I do have a Facebook page, but I don’t post anything there, and I made sure that my primary personal email address, gerv[at]gerv.net, was displayed in the profile so that people could contact me directly.

Today, I happened to visit my Facebook profile, and noticed that they had changed the displayed email address to gerv.markham[at]facebook.com! The old one was still in the database, but it had been hidden. Email to the Facebook address is forwarded by Facebook to the other one, so it ends up in the same place. [Update: I now think this is not correct. The email instead goes to my Facebook inbox, and I don't get a notification email to say it's there. Which is, IMO, even worse - they don't just pass it through their servers on the way to where it would have gone, they keep it, and fail to send me a copy!]

In other words, Facebook silently inserted themselves into the path of formerly-direct unencrypted communications from people who want to email me...

[IainB]

Finally someone explained to me wtf this whole thing was actually about, thank you.
Since it's such a short explanation let's just recap it here:
...

-mouser (June 28, 2012, 06:52 AM)

I could be wrong, of course, but I'm not so sure it's that simple.
For example: Changing your email address on Facebook isn’t going to help: why you’re screwed anyway

[wraith808]

From Gervase Markham's story:

The email instead goes to my Facebook inbox, and I don't get a notification email to say it's there.

So this is why Facebook introduced it: They want you to go to their site to check for email. They don't want to send the messages to your email and have you interact there, they don't want you to use a search engine to find content, and they don't want you to use forums and instant messages to talk to people. They don't want you ever to get the idea to leave the site.

-justice (June 28, 2012, 03:49 AM)

Yup... that's what I meant/said earlier.

[IainB]

From Gervase Markham's story:

The email instead goes to my Facebook inbox, and I don't get a notification email to say it's there.

So this is why Facebook introduced it: They want you to go to their site to check for email. They don't want to send the messages to your email and have you interact there, they don't want you to use a search engine to find content, and they don't want you to use forums and instant messages to talk to people. They don't want you ever to get the idea to leave the site.

-justice (June 28, 2012, 03:49 AM)

Yup... that's what I meant/said earlier.

-wraith808 (June 28, 2012, 11:26 AM)

Indeed, so you did, and I suspected you were probably likely to be proven correct.
I reckon this could have all been a mistake or a miscalculated risk on Facebook's part.
The Law of Unintended Consequences, etc. - big potential for a backlash from those members who wake up to the implications/ramifications of what has been done. Somewhere in there, trust could get wiped out.
Even if this supposition turns out not to be true:

They don't want you ever to get the idea to leave the site.

- it must leave a lot of people wondering.

Fair do's to Google. At least when they introduced g+, though they seemed clearly to be aligning themselves as a Facebook competitor, they didn't make it (g+) compulsory - though they seemed to come pretty close to doing that.

[wraith808]

Fair do's to Google. At least when they introduced g+, though they seemed clearly to be aligning themselves as a Facebook competitor, they didn't make it (g+) compulsory - though they seemed to come pretty close to doing that.

-IainB (June 28, 2012, 08:39 PM)

Oh, I imagine that's in large part because of Buzz.

[IainB]

Was buzz "social networking"-related? I'm not sure
I tried using buzz - and wave for that matter - but still have no real idea what either was supposed to achieve.

[Jibz]

http://news.cnet.com...altered-e-mail-lost/

An alarming number of people are reporting that the new e-mail address Facebook forced on users this week is changing their address books while intercepting and losing unknown amounts of e-mail.

Facebook users say contacts' e-mail addresses on phones and personal devices have been altered without their consent -- and their e-mail communication is being redirected elsewhere, and lost.

[IainB]

http://news.cnet.com...altered-e-mail-lost/

An alarming number of people are reporting that the new e-mail address Facebook forced on users this week is changing their address books while intercepting and losing unknown amounts of e-mail.
Facebook users say contacts' e-mail addresses on phones and personal devices have been altered without their consent -- and their e-mail communication is being redirected elsewhere, and lost.

-Jibz (June 30, 2012, 05:35 PM)

Oops. Maybe it's deliberate? Or maybe it is the effect of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
It is confusing though, because, well, it seems the Facebook email changes might be a good thing: Why Facebook Forcing Its Email On You Is Brilliant

[IainB]

Well the subject of this discussion is Facebook Changed Everyone’s Email to @Facebook.com; Here’s How to Fix It, but it now seems as though, if you didn't apply the fix - or quickly enough - then you might have some irreversible problems.
For example: @facebook.com e-mail plague chokes phone address books

The splash damage from Facebook's forced addition of @facebook.com e-mail addresses to users' profiles has carried over to phone contacts. Users who have given Facebook permission to sync information from the site to their phone's contacts have noticed that since the great e-mail address donation, legitimate e-mail address entries have been replaced with Facebook ones (as reported by CNET). As a result, some messages have been going to unintended locations or have become hidden. And there's no easy way to revert the changes...(you can read the rest in the link above)

I'm not sure what the word is that could describe this sort of shambles.