When people visit your Facebook page, if they click the About link under your icon photo in the header they will be taken to a page that displays various information you have entered about yourself: schools attended, employers, contact information, etc.
When you set up your personal FB page you may have entered an email address to be displayed to friends or a wider audience (depending on your privacy settings), or you may have decided NOT to list any email address.
If you haven’t revisited this choice recently, Facebook has played a little joke on you. They decided to give everyone an email address, yourname@facebook.com… AND they decided to replace whatever other email address you listed as your primary contact information (or no listing at all) with this new Facebook email address!
Why is this bad for you? Because:
1. Anyone who looks for your email address on FB will only see this @facebook.com one.
2. Any email sent to the @facebook.com address does NOT go to your regular email account – instead it turns into a Facebook message.
3. A FB message sent to you (either deliberately or accidently by using the @facebook.com address) by any person who Facebook does not think is a close FB friend (so anyone who isn’t already your FB friend, or is but with whom you don’t interact there regularly) does NOT go into your FB Messages folder and get indicated by a red flag at the top of your page. Instead it goes into a different folder called Other, which is the FB equivalent of a spam folder – you must deliberately go into the Messages folder, and only then will you see the Other folder on the left under Messages, which you can then click to see its contents.
4. Thus is is quite possible you are missing important messages from people who think they are emailing you, but instead are going to a folder on Facebook without any notification to you!
Fortunately you can modify this email listing back to what you want:
1. In the upper right corner of any Facebook page, next to your name and “Home”, click the downward-pointing arrow to reveal the pulldown menu for privacy and account settings. Select account settings.
2. On the General Account Settings page you will see your primary email address listed. Ifi it is the @facebook.com address click the edit link on the right of that line.
3. This will show you all of the email addresses for you that Facebook knows. Select the real email address you want to be displayed, or use “add another email” if it’s not already there.
4. follow the instructions to supply your Facebook password and authorize the change.
5. If you don’t want your email address displayed to anyone, go to Privacy Settings->Edit Basic Settings, select Email, and set the privacy for all your email addresses to Only Me.