The @Facebook.com email address is dead but no one is mourning its passing.
The social network launched the email system back in 2010 and handed out an official Facebook email address to each of its account holders. The @Facebook.com has been officially retired on Monday and will take effect early next month.
"We're making this change because most people haven't been using their Facebook email address, and we can focus on improving our mobile messaging experience for everyone," a Facebook person said in a statement.
The admission is loud and clear from the social network. The company even encouraged account holders to make use of the email service when it made @Facebook.com the default address of all users in 2012 without their permission. This resulted to complaints from all directions and as expected, users did not budge.
After the Facebook email address of a user has been killed, messages sent to that address will not appear on the Message inbox on Facebook, but will be forwarded to the primary email used by the user to sign up for the network. Since the profile URL on Facebook is also the same as one's Facebook email address, then one can easily send messages to people's main email.
Users can turn off the forwarding feature, but will not receive the message on their primary email. If this will be the case, senders will receive a bounce-back email notification.
The change comes after Facebook announced its $19-billion purchase of the mobile messaging platform WhatsApp. This is a clear indication that the social network wants to play it big in the mobile messaging industry. WhatsApp, which currently has more than 450 million users, also announced that it will be introducing free voice calls in the the near future.
Facebook has been tweaking some features lately. One of the latest tweaks if how the network will respect the visibility settings of a members who have passed away. The network has announced that the privacy settings of the deceased user will remain intact and will not be turned to friends-only as what the company did before. Friends and family can also request for the Look Back video of users whose accounts have been memorialized.
The social network has also introduced new pronouns to choose from, a screaming gender sensitivity move that will earn the company many points from its users.
With the changes that Facebook might be introducing in the near future, no one might even remember to say buh-bye to their Facebook email account, in case they even knew it existed.
