Facebook is Hiding Your Mail | Hacker News Reader

Facebook is Hiding Your Mail

slate.com

122 pointsedw51944 comments

THIS EXPLAINS EVERYTHING. God damnit Facebook.

So a couple of months back we did a give away, 100 people who like our Facebook page (for the Minecraft forum) get a free copy of Minecraft. After the competition "closed" I picked 100 winners and messaged them their copy, this is what, $2000 - $2500 value?

Less than 10% (edit: I checked my spreadsheet, 8 people) ever replied to me and this explains why. Because I can't message from a fan page I messaged from my personal account... so most of these people don't know that they ever won (they weren't my friends) and probably never will. The message is there sitting waiting to be read...

sigh.

Golden rule of spam filtering: a false positive is much, much worse than a false negative. Friends only messaging is a kind of Gordian Knot solution that is admirable in its boldness, but spam is a complex problem that requires a complex solution. Facebook shouldn't be taking the easy way out, especially as it becomes the de facto communication platform.

Just to add a personal data point, I had a very similar experience with the author of the piece. Lost my wallet recently, and lo and behold, I got a Facebook message I never saw till today. Yes, 99% of all the "Other" messages were spam, but this was probably the most important FB message I ever got. Lucky for me I also had an ID card in there that the finder was nice enough to extrapolate my work email address from, but Facebook needs to address this.

Facebook jumping shark--a loose timeline:

2004: I sign up for Facebook because it lets me easily find classmates' cell numbers, and I got my first cell phone for Christmas!

2005: wow, my HS friends are all joining facebook! More connection.

2006: networks de-emphasized as facebook opens to anyone with an e-mail address. Many stop sharing contact info with a network, so odds I can find cells/emails go down.

2007: I graduate, but use Facebook messages to stay in touch with friends (feels less formal/weighty than email).

2008: I find some guy's wallet, find his facebook page, message him, and he gets it back.

2009: I'm using Facebook less. But Facebook stock is burning up. Everyone I know who went to work for Facebook could retire. I can't--but I apply to go back to school instead, which is a rough approximation.

2010: I really can't get much info on my new classmates from Facebook, except streams of status updates during class--a distraction, not real communication.

2011: I learn Facebook spams you a lot if you don't log in frequently enough (they need those monthly active numbers). Messages to strangers apparently don't work.

2012: What can I do on Facebook again?

Under 2011, you can add "Facebook starts putting everything your friends read on certain sites into your timeline but won't let you read them without opting in to the insanity as well": http://alanhogan.com/facebook-pseudo-links

This explains why I don't receive event invitations anymore- my Other folder is full of them.

Unfortunately, a check also revealed a (now former) client asking for some urgent advice. Wrong forum for him to do that, but an awkward position to put me in.

The problem is you are stuck wading through the spam, since FB's notion of spam (not from friends) is not the average person's notion. It is worse than no spam filtering.

I immediately checked my "Other" messages, and found messages from:

- a cute chick who said i'm handsome, sent 3 months ago

- a guy who asked about wavecom modem, found my name when he googled about the modem

- a long lost friend

- random guy (but not spam), sent last year

Oh my.

I just went through mine and can see why: I have dozens of messages from non-friends on Facebook, and 100% of them were spam. If Facebook made this non-friend inbox more visible, they'd need to improve their spam-filtering.

Yes, this is effectively a spam folder. I don't see how that's Facebook's fault.

If the message if from a non-spammy, active account, why bury it?

Facebook KISS: everything that isn't from friends or friends of friends is spam

Twitter KISS: nothing is spam.

Facebook placed their last message to me about changes to their own privacy policy into this folder!

It looks like it works just fine then.

They've poorly defined spam. That's their fault.

I just went through mine and found quite a few relevant messages that I completely missed, which I would have liked to have received before the events themselves or before deadlines.

I contacted a journalist through her Facebook account and today just heard from her thanks to the Slate article. She was sorry she did not see my important email.

I'm happy to have found a very sweet message from an old friend! How rude it would have been to (seemingly) ignore it.

While Facebook might be right in general to hide messages from non-friends, they should certainly have moved that message to my inbox once we became friends (which apparently happened only the day after she sent the message).

I had a Facebook recruiter send me a message on Facebook about the possibility of work for them, and it went to my Other folder. I didn't see the message for months.

I'm glad I don't have to worry about being beholden to a third party in situations like this.

I canceled my Facebook account about four months ago. I don't have to worry about missing messages; the only way people can reach me is via Twitter or email, both of which are posted prominently on my website.

or, why you should always put a phone number, address, and/or e-mail address (even if they're all work contacts for privacy) on your expensive belongings. that guy spent way more time trying to contact her through facebook than i would have.

i'm not a facebook user, but how do people accrue spam in that other folder? either messages from strangers are legitimate like "i found your laptop" or they're from spammy facebook accounts which i would assume get quickly terminated from other users reporting them, which should delete all of the messages they've spammed out. no?

> should delete all of the messages

I'd hope not. Deleting a Facebook account shouldn't delete all of the messages sent from it from their receivers' inboxes -- what if a long time friend decided to delete there Facebook profile? I could lose years worth of conversation with them. Messages belong as much to the receiver as the sender, if not more.

unless your friend gets flagged as a spammer, i don't think their messages would be deleted.

and lets be honest, facebook doesn't ever delete anything anyway, it just sets deleted=1 and hides it from you.

I hope you are backing up up those things. If you don't, you should have zero trust into being able to access those even tomorrow. Why would a company like Facebook care about you?

You feel like your memories belong into your control, then why do you give a third-party total control over them?

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1717

> Why would a company like Facebook care about you?

See twitter. You can't access your older tweets or DMs. A big F you from them.

I posted on Facebook about this problem almost a month ago and several friends confirmed that they also missed important messages (http://on.fb.me/rr8pAK). A shame this hasn't been fixed already.

I just looked at this. Most of the messages in the 'Other' section are things I probably would have ignored anyway. I did find a five year old message that slipped past me. I was looking for a good python book and this guy recommended Dive Into Python. For a while, I was a bit aggravated at everyone ignoring my question, but I suppose I would have complained about Facebook spamming me if they would have made more effort to notify me of those incoming messages.

This is not an example of 'evil' facebook, but poor user experience. Facebook clearly does a poor job of explaning the user hat the inbox actually contains

AMTTLOPW have lost useful messages for months to Facebook's Other Messages, old friends, people trying to get in touch with family members, etc. No spam. I'm pretty find-able through search engines, etc, but people are turning to Facebook first for messaging these days.

Just for anyone else: AMTTLOPW = add me to the list of people who. That was hard to find via Google, for some reason.

It would probably help if they just put the number of "Other"/spam messages next to the "Other" button. I had no idea there was anything in there until I checked just now. Maybe they think it looks bad showing how many spam-ish messages you are receiving?

I wanted to read this article, but Onswipe decided my first generation iPad was unworthy of the mana contained within, and quickly closed Safari repeatedly, obviously to protect me.

Thank you Onswipe for saving me from reading or using my iPad.

My other inbox contained mostly spam, and 1 very important message from a friend.

This controls spam but it has it's side effect. This is a UI issue!. they should fix it..maybe making the link to the 'other' folder more visible

Or put an unread number next to it. I mean, even gmail tells me how many spam messages I have.

Facebook's spam filtering assumes friends won't spam friends. Not the case. Friends spam friends constantly! Why can't they just filter it as "from friends", "from others", then "spam"? Then make the navigation between those folders stick out more.

The way Facebook does it now would make sense if this were still 2004. These days even your Facebook friends aren't really your friends. People with thousands of Facebook friends can't possibly have real, meaningful relationships with all of them. Most people I know just collect friends I'm Facebook like trophies. I get tons of requests from strangers myself. My point is that in times like these when your "friends" aren't really friends, Facebook spam filtering should be implemented like any other email spam filter.

Edit: My phone buzzed just 2 seconds after I posted this comment. What was the alert? A spammy Facebook message from one of my friends.

"No Messages"

Oh. :(

Another great reason to operate your own mail server.

...which does absolutely nothing to address the situation where someone sends a message to a Facebook account that winds up in the "Other" box.

...and use that instead of Facebook. I thought that would be obvious, but apparently not.

That's fine for messages you send or friends that know not to communicate over Facebook, but it doesn't mean your Facebook inbox goes away (unless you close your account). It still leaves open the possibility that someone will try to contact you on Facebook and their message will wind up in the Other inbox.

Well, a good reason to use email. I'm quite happy with the spam filtering on Google Apps and have no particular reason to go through the trouble of setting up my own server.

But are you happy with Google data-mining your email to deliver custom ads? (Of course, if you have an adblocker installed you won't see them, but the principle holds.)

Yes I am happy for Google to do that. You phrase the question as if people won't have even thought about it that way. I think it's a trade where I come off the best.

I'm not much of a consumer. I don't buy that much stuff. My value to advertisers is probably a lot less than they think it is so I'm currently doing fairly well from selling my profile in return for free services.

Nobody has addressed the author's failure to back up his files. The loss wouldn't have hurt so bad.

Dropbox, Google Docs, Office Live, Ubuntu One - it's not like there's a lack of options.

The loss of computer/files was just the framing device, a scenario that created a need to communicate which is the actual point of the article. Why bikeshed the author's workflow? Its not like she'd actually see it here.

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