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Whether you’ve noticed or not, you have a new primary e-mail address listed as your Facebook contact, and most likely it’s an address you’ve never used.
The social-networking site has quietly replaced your default e-mail addresses such as Gmail and Yahoo! with your @Facebook.com address, an e-mail service option the company launched a few years ago and synced with Timeline in April. Facebook recently assigned @facebook.com email addresses to all users – even without opting in to the feature. And the company reportedly changed the settings across all profiles to reflect the new email address. Facebook email addresses are by default the same as your public username. The company announced a messaging client that unified Facebook messages with email in 2010, which was promoted as a “seamless messaging” experience.
Emails sent to @facebook.com accounts are directed to the Facebook message center, the same way that an in-network message would be received.
It appears that countless users—have been swept up in an under-the-radar effort by Facebook to drum up support for its email platform, which landed with something of a thud when it launched in 2010. So the social networking juggernaut decided it would default users’ email addresses away from whatever they had listed and toward their assigned Facebook aliases, and has been doing so in what appears to be a gradual rollout. (Not everyone’s address has been changed.)
The big question here, said Gervese Markham, a tech blogger whose weekend post about having his Facebook profile changed may have launched the sudden sweep of coverage, is “Who controls my presentation of myself on Facebook?”
Users who want to change their display email address setting should check out our Step by Step Guide on How to Change Your Facebook Email Back.
Resources:
Facebook’s Brazen Switch: User Email Addresses Change to @Facebook.com – The Daily Beast
Facebook just switched your default e-mail address – CNN.com
