Facebook's e-mail debacle: One 'bug' fix, but rollback impossible

Facebook changed its 900+ million users' primary e-mail address a week ago, setting in motion a continually cascading series of failures.

Users have lost unknown amounts of e-mail, and address books were unknowingly overwritten. Facebook's first official response yesterday was that everyone was just confused about how to look in their Facebook inboxes.

Now they've changed their tune. But their admission of intercepted and lost e-mail, questions about privacy ethics, and new issues around Apple iOS 6 show that Facebook's Apple app is also adding secondary, undeletable contacts into users' address books.

Facebook responded to our first article documenting the problems and citing widespread user anger, with spokesperson Meredith Chin saying:

Regarding the "email loss" this may actually just be confusion around the Messages Inbox: By default, messages from friends or friends of friends go into your Inbox. Everything else goes to your Other folder.

(If you click on Messages in your left hand navigation menu, you'll see below it an Other folder that drops down.) That is likely where the messages are being sent from other people's emails. Even if that person is friends with them on Facebook, if the friend doesn't have that email on their Facebook account, the message could end up in the Other folder.

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