Facebook Switched Your Email Address Without Asking You. Here’s How to Fix It

Change isn’t always necessarily a bad thing, but if it has a detrimental effect on your ability to communicate, it’s hard to argue that it’s not. Especially when those changes are made without warning and without your permission.

So what is this change? Last week, Facebook summarily decided that its users should be using their @facebook.com address (did you even know you had an @facebook address?) as their primary email address. Not only did Facebook not ask its users to make this change, but it also didn’t even bother to inform anyone, leaving it to users to discover for themselves.

Many users only noticed when they began experiencing errors or issues when syncing their contact lists between a mobile device and their Facebook address book. Suddenly, when Joe tried to send Bob an email from his Smartphone, the only address available was <bobsusername>@facebook.com.

Fortunately, fixing the issue is fairly straightforward:

Go to your Timeline. Click the About tab, below your profile picture. Scroll to the Contact Info box and hit Edit. Switch all crossed-out circle symbols to a full circle for each inbox you want visible on your profile. If you don’t want @facebook.com to show up, switch it from a full circle (“Shown on Timeline”) to crossed out (“Hidden from Timeline”).

FBemailChange

In the above example, notice that only the @gmail account is set to be visible while the others, including the Facebook account, will now be hidden.

Now, what do you do about your address book that Facebook managed to mangle? Because many of your friends and associates may not have updated their accounts to reflect their non-Facebook email addresses, they’re probably now in your address book too as @facebook contacts.

How do you fix that? Well, thankfully, the internet has come to the rescue once again. Lifehacker has written up an article on how to get your contacts back but don’t forget to post a reminder to your friends on your wall to make sure they fix their contact information otherwise the next time you sync, you’ll be back in the same boat.

Read the solution on Lifehacker here:

http://lifehacker.com/5922951/how-to-restore-your-address-book-after-facebook-messed-it-up

If you have any issues following this or it isn’t working the way you’d expect, call your local CMIT Solutions office for help!

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