Facebook's e-mail switch still causing problems

[err0r]

Last week, Facebook decided to unilaterally change the e-mail address displayed on members' "About" pages to ones that end with the company's own "@facebook.com."

 

For many, it's become another example of Facebook's famous "move fast and break things" mentality. The move resulted in confusion over missing e-mail, then was further compounded by a software glitch that automatically replaced important work e-mail addresses in some members' contact lists.

 

The result was "one monumental screw-up," computer security expert Graham Cluley said Tuesday.

 

The problems started when the contact e-mail addresses members chose to display on their Facebook profile pages were changed without notice to the " [email protected]" style address the company handed out in late 2010. That was an attempt to introduce the world to a new social-network-centric messaging system, a move that has proven to be far from revolutionary.

 

Last week's address swap may have been annoying, but was fairly easy to fix.

 

Yet some complained they were missing e-mail messages. Facebook initially used the user-error defense, saying the missing e-mails were probably showing up in the "other messages" area, which users don't see unless they first click the "messages" link.

 

On Monday, however, the company said there was another problem.

 

"If you've specified in privacy settings that you only want to receive messages from friends or friends of friends, then the message will bounce," the company said. "We've noticed that in a very limited number of cases, the bounce e-mail back to the original sender may not be delivered because it may get intercepted by spam filters. We are working to make sure that e-mail senders consistently receive bounce messages."

 

But that glitch was only the start. Reports began surfacing about a more serious side effect.

 

Cnet tech writer Violet Blue (who some readers might remember from her days as SFGate.com's sex columnist) wrote that more people were reporting their mobile contact lists were being re-written with Facebook addresses, which meant they could be losing contact information vital to their jobs or personal life.

 

One blogger, Rachel Luxemburg, wrote that "a co-worker discovered that his contact info for me had been silently updated to overwrite my work e-mail address with my Facebook e-mail address. He discovered this only after sending work e-mails to the wrong address."

 

Even worse, she wrote, "the e-mails are not actually in my Facebook messages. I checked. They've vanished into the ether. For all I know, I could be missing a lot more e-mails from friends, colleagues, or family members, and never even know it."

 

The problem apparently affected users of older Android smart phones and beta testers of Apple's upcoming iOS 6 software, which has tighter integration with Facebook, wrote Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for the computer security firm Sophos.

 

Facebook blamed a software bug.

 

"Contact synchronization on devices is performed through an API," or application programming interface, the company said. "For most devices, we've verified that the API is working correctly and pulling the primary e-mail address associated with the users' Facebook account.

 

"However, for people on certain devices, a bug meant that the device was pulling the last e-mail address added to the account rather than the primary e-mail address, resulting [email protected] addresses being pulled. We are in the process of fixing this issue and it will be resolved soon."

 

In a Sophos blog post, Cluley said Facebook might have been trying to get more people to use [email protected] e-mail regularly, but "they've ended up with more disgruntled users who will be wary of the next time Facebook changes things without proper notification and without thinking of the repercussions."

 

Source: SFGate