Facebook email: pointless endeavor, spammer's dream, or both?

Seriously, Facebook?

As you may or may not have heard, Facebook made the decision recently to pull the ol' switch-a-roo on many of its users by making their default email address an @facebook.com email address, instead of whatever they had beforehand (see: Fixing the Facebook e-mail foul-up). In this post, I'm going to discuss why Facebook email is a completely pointless endeavor, as well as why it may well be a spammer's dream come true.

Pointless Endeavor

First of all, you may be wondering how you send/receive emails from/to your Facebook email address. Currently, you can only receive emails to your Facebook email address. Emails sent to your Facebook email will show up in either your "Messages" folder or your "Other" folder. "What "Other" folder," you might be asking. It's this one; the one that no one else knows about, either.

After a bit of testing comprised of having emails sent to my Facebook email from various email aliases, here are some things I've discovered about which folder an email goes to:

1: If a person you're "friends" with sends you an email from the email address they used to sign up their Facebook account with, that email will show up either in your "Messages" folder or in a chat window, if you have it open for that person.

2: Emails from any email address that's not tied to the account of individuals you're "friends" with, will go to your "Other" folder.

So, what's the use for a Facebook email alias? Easy! It's... it's... *crickets chirping*

I have absolutely no idea, because it is REALLY useless as-is. Here's a not-very-extensively-thought-out theory for you, though:

Facebook's email platform will one day be something DRASTICALLY different than this shell of a platform we're all suddenly becoming aware of. And why are we becoming aware of it? Because Facebook made this crazy change that has EVERYONE talking about it and eating it up. Now, we're all aware of it. Maybe that's all Facebook wants for now.

A Spammer's Dream

Let's take a minute to assume a world that the millionaires and billionaires at Facebook seem to be envisioning up there in the clouds: a world where people pull up their email clients and send an email to a Facebook friend's alias that they somehow magically know. Also, this world is comprised of Facebook users who obsessively check both their "Messages" folder and "Other" folder, because both of them could very likely contain legitimate messages.

For instance, let's say I'm at work, and they have a firewall policy installed which blocks my usage of not only Facebook, but also the email provider that I use, which houses the email address my Facebook account is signed up with. Now, I want to send an email to a friend on Facebook, but I'll have to do it from my work email alias! This email will then go to that person's "Other" folder -- the very same folder that emails from Nigerian scammers who sign their emails "Barrister Such-n-such" go to.

(See how ridiculous this is already getting? Another +1 for "pointless endeavor.")

This is where the "Other" folder becomes a spammer's dream. Since a person's Facebook email address is simply their user name with @facebook.com appended to it, I can't express the simplicity of scraping the Web for Facebook user names, populating them into a list, appending @facebook.com to them, then blasting them with spam messages.

All of a sudden, the spammers are getting their garbage in front of eyeballs, and who knows how many clicks they might get from such a platform. I mean, maybe it's an infinitesimally small number, but the point here is that Facebook has now given people a reason to have to dig into the equivalent of their "Spam" inbox. Terrible.

Conclusion

Basically, I fail to see any use whatsoever for Facebook's poor excuse of an email platform. And the fact that they decided to take it upon themselves, for whatever reason, to modify a majority of their users' contact information is ridiculous on a number of levels. Now, we're all left to somehow read about this and fix it ourselves -- and that's those of us who will ever know about this in the first place! Think of all the people who will never hear about this, and amongst them, those who have their email addresses visible for a reason and never utilize Facebook messaging.

Usually, I just let Facebook's silent changes roll off my back with little more than the sharing of an article that shows others how to rollback if they'd like, but this time, Facebook has seriously irritated me. I'm having to dig pretty deep to discover any good reasons for this change of theirs, and as soon as I come up with one, it's immediately crushed by a logical "wtf!?" from my brain.

Please get your garbage change out of our faces, Facebook, and -- for once -- allow us to opt-in... that is, if you can figure out how to actually inform all of your users of a change in the first place. Thanks.

What do you think about Facebook's move to modify all of their users' contact information to show an @facebook.com email address? Let us know in the comments below!