The soon-to-be enormous world of Facebook email spam

Welcome to the soon-to-be enormous world of Facebook email spam

By David Gewirtz for ZDNet Government

I am pissed off. Like most other Facebook users, I woke up recently to discover I had a Facebook email address. I don't want a Facebook email address. Frankly, if I were King of the World, I'd boot Facebook into a giant black hole and laugh gleefully as the entire thing burned to a never-to-haunt-us again crispy hulk.

Fine, I'm mixing metaphors. But I'm pissed.

I didn't pay all that much attention to this until I read Violet's piece on Facebook email addresses, and then I realized what a nightmare those [profanity deleted] at Facebook are.

See also: Apple iOS 6 and the Facebook email address lock-in?

First, I didn't exactly want to log into Facebook. I try to avoid doing so more than once a month. But, fine, in I went. Then I looked at my profile settings and my contact settings. I found my previously entered email address (the one I use for everything) and noticed that I'd explicitly marked it as "Hidden from profile".

I had already told Facebook I didn't want to share my email address.

So what do the [expletive-deleted] at Facebook do? They gave me a Facebook email address and made it public. Even though they knew I explicitly DID NOT WANT my email address displayed on Facebook.

But that is not the worst of it. Oh, no. Facebook doesn't allow me to turn off my new Facebook email inbox and refuse mail. They just allow me to hide my Facebook email address.

So, let's say I want to send email to someone named Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. He doesn't want me to see his Facebook email address. Oh, my, I still want to send him email there.

What could his address possibly be? Hmmm. Well, Facebook takes the first name and concatenates it with the second name. That's tough to figure out. No, no it's not. I'll just send mail to [email protected] -- even though the email address is supposed to be hidden.

Now, imagine you're a spammer.

You know that, oh, about 900 million people use Facebook -- and almost all use their real names. So, you know that if you put a real name (minus the space) in front of @facebook.com, most likely those users will get that email.

See also: Facebook email: pointless endeavor, spammer’s dream, or both?

Now, do those users have email rules? No. Do those users have junk filters? No. Do those users have any defense at all, even the ability to turn off getting email. No. No. No. No.

Thanks, Facebook. You just [expletive deleted] us up the [expletive deleted]. [Expletive deleted] you!

Normally, I'm not a big fan of added regulation, but I think it's high time we regulated the [expletive deleted] out of Facebook. Previously, I'd mentioned I wanted to prevent employers from demanding access to your Facebook accounts, but I now think it's high time we explicitly legislate Facebook into making all new features optional and opt-in only.

This [f-bomb] sucks.

Source:
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/governmen...e-enormous-world-of-facebook-email-spam/11298

 

I'd guess that's gonna be around 500MM + - new deliverables....

We gonna call FB addy's GI or TLD? No filters to me = GI


On a side note:

NEW DATA JUST IN!! ALL Facebook verified!!! 900MM address ALL with opt in and on one - yes that's right! - ONE convenient DVD!!

Only selling this 267 times as to not whore it out - PM me for pricing!

:five:

 

Interesting read.

:32:

 

This is actually pretty cool. Guys that scrape emails/BH stuff etc will have a blast with this.

 

I noticed it myself but I did some tests and never got any mail to people that you are not friends with or from an email account that is not linked on facebook.
It looks like you can only send/receive mail to people that you are friends with and the email that you have on file with facebook.

 

FB will be the 5th of the big 4. So instead of saying big 4 you'll say big 5. There do have a lot of filters and in no way can be considered GI. They're not as hard to mess with as say yahoo, but they are a bitch.

 

This is all wishful thinking.

Facebook's whole idea of email is to only show you email from your FB friends and dump everything else into "Other" folder. People who have been giving FB email a try complained about losing the messages they actually wanted.

Facebook launched their email 2 years ago and they have gotten nowhere. People who want to send private messages use IM. People who want open messaging use real email.

Their whole idea of email goes against what users expect from their webmail clients.

 

Pretty interesting. Just mailed myself something super spammy but did it from my email. Need to experiment what happens from strange emails .

 

Too many false positives of a spam filter are a bulk mailers friend indeed.

 

People probably won't use it, but I've experimented with FB doing other things that require sending email to them and they definitely have filters in place.

 

I agree there are plenty of uses for FB I just doubt Big 4 webmails will be turning into Big 5 anytime soon...