Recently, Facebook decided to make a change to everyone's profiles: they have a shiny new email address, @facebook.com. Immediately, I was against this decision. It removed my personalised email address from my profile - my @paulcarrollwriter.com address that I wanted - to a specific Facebook one I'm never going to use.
Articles are now popping up all over the Internet about what a bad move this was on Facebook's behalf. Why?
People are losing valuable emails. Thanks to Facebook applications and syncing with Contacts on phones, every single owner of a smart phone who's allowed this has lost the email addresses for their friends, family, co-workers and clients. They've been replaced with the Facebook addresses.
An even bigger problem? Facebook didn't tell people. They just did it.
Worse still, the emails don't come in as regular mail. Unlike messages sent on Facebook, you don't get a notification for these emails. Instead, you need to go to: https://www.facebook.com/messages/other/
That page will give you any and all emails sent to your @facebook.com email address. However, it will also give you messages sent by events, pages and groups. Everything has been thrown into the Other folder.
You can change your email address back by going here: https://www.facebook.com/editprofile.php?sk=contact or by going to your profile, going to info, and clicking Edit on the Contact Information section. A word of warning, though: this won't guarantee that people's phones will be updated in the same way.
Spread the word about the dangers of the new @facebook.com email addresses. They're inconvenient, and if you do business through your phone and/or through Facebook, you could be losing out on more than funny emails from family and friends.
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