Email: Another Annoying Default Facebook Setting to Change

In a pushy move, Facebook just made the Facebook email address you probably didn't even know you had the default email address on your timeline, hoping to push users to its messaging service.

In a pushy move, Facebook just made the Facebook email address you probably didn't even know you had the default email address on your timeline, hoping to push users to its messaging service. We find this confusing, or rather, annoying for the following reasons.

• Who uses Facebook messages as their primary email address? Nobody. So it doesn't deserve the primary spot.
• If someone has found that contact information, this person is already on Facebook, why don't they just send a message that way?
• For those who have opted not to personalize their Facebook URLs -- like us -- the e-mail address shows up as a forgettable string of numbers. At least in our case, that is because we have zero interest in using Facebook like that.
• Apparently, these rules don't apply to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, as Reuters' Matthew Keys learned when he sent an e-mail to [e-mail] and got a bounceback. We also tried and got the same undeliverable result.

Anyway, like all of Facebook's user-unfriendly default settings, this one is easy enough to change if you know where to go. Just head to your About page, choose the edit tab under e-mail and then flip that 'do not enter' sign, which means "Hidden from Timeline" to match your preference.

Update 2:38 p.m.: A Facebook spokesperson has confirmed in a statement to TPM the site-wide change and the motivation behind it. "As we announced back in April, we’ve been updating addresses on Facebook to make them consistent across our site," a spokesperson wrote it an email.