It’s The End Of The @Facebook.com Email Address As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

Facebook is putting an end to its @facebook.com email project, which means your life will probably go on exactly as it had been with no discernible changes whatsoever. For future reference, don’t email me at darrell.etherington@facebook.com, unless you want to receive no response, which is exactly what would’ve happened before this change was announced anyway.

The reason for ditching the facebook.com emails is pretty straightforward: They weren’t being used by many people at all, Facebook tells us. For those few who were, messages sent to your Facebook email will be automatically forwarded to whatever email you have on file with the social network, beginning in March when the changes go into effect. That’s on by default, by the way, so if you’re not looking forward to the prospect of receiving email from an address you may have forgotten you had, you can go into your account settings on Facebook to turn it off.

That’s like the opposite of the move Facebook made in 2012, when it hid all your emails except for your Facebook one by default under the then-new iOS 6 contact sync feature. This led many to have to manually change their settings back, just as this switch results in another requirement for manual intervention to make sure you don’t get a flood of new messages you weren’t noticing before.

This likely isn’t going to result in any teary-eyed bad feelings from general users, but some people might be pretty happy: We’d heard that some Facebook employees had to change their @Facebook.com email addresses when the change was implemented back in 2010 to free them up for users, so maybe some of those will be cleared for staff once again.