Facebook Fixes Phone Contacts Glitch Caused By Email Switch

When Facebook switched your primary e-mail address with your @Facebook.com address last week, it may have affected the email addresses listed in your phone contacts too.

Some Facebook members who sync their mobile devices to the social network's app have reported that email addresses in their phone contacts have been replaced with @Facebook.com addresses. Although the company said its application programming interface (API) is working properly, a bug is pulling the last email address added to the account to mobile devices rather than the primary email address.

"Following the changes to the email visibility settings, we have received reports that certain phones are syncing their address books to the new Facebook address that is visible instead of the email users had previously shared with friends," a Facebook spokesperson told Mashable. "We do not believe that this is a widespread issue and have confirmed that our API is correctly delivering all email addresses that are shared with a user, regardless of whether the email addresses are shown on a person's timeline."

Facebook said it is currently working to fix the glitch: "We are in the process of fixing this issue and it will be resolved soon," the spokesperson said. "After that, those specific devices should pull the correct addresses."

SEE ALSO: Facebook Switched Your Email to One You've Probably Never Used

Last week, reports circulated that the social-networking site quietly replaced users' default email addresses such as Gmail and Yahoo with their @Facebook.com address, an email service option the company launched a few years ago and synced with Timeline in April. The news did not sit well with members — many were upset about how Facebook wasn't obvious about informing members about the switch — and others claimed it caused a huge inconvenience in their communications with others.

"Today, a co-worker discovered that his contact info for me had been silently updated to overwrite my work email address with my Facebook email address," Adobe staffer Rachel Luxemburg wrote in a personal blog post first spotted by CNET. "He discovered this only after sending work emails to the wrong address. And even worse, the emails are not actually in my Facebook messages. I checked. They've vanished into the ether. For all I know, I could be missing a lot more emails from friends, colleagues, or family members, and never even know it."

This occurred even though she replaced her Facebook e-mail address back to what it was. Facebook said users should be receiving messages properly — they might just be showing up in a part of your inbox called "Other Messages" that you're not checking.

"If someone sends an email to your @facebook.com email address and it's from an address associated with a Facebook friend or friend of friend's accounts, it will go into the inbox," Facebook said. "If an email is sent from an address not associated with a friend or friend of friend's Facebook account, it will go into your other folder."

However, if a user has specified in their privacy settings that they only want to receive messages from friends or friend of friends, then the message will bounce.

"We've noticed that in a very limited number of cases, the bounce e-mail back to the original sender may not be delivered because it may get intercepted by spam filters," Facebook said. "We are working to make sure that e-mail senders consistently receive bounce messages."

Facebook acknowledged last week that it should have better explained the email switch to its users, according to the Wall Street Journal report. A Facebook spokesperson said the move was not intended to promote its own services: "We want people to use whatever service is most effective for them."

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ymgerman