Facebook's foray into email ended Monday, when the social media giant quietly retired the email service that many users didn't even know existed. Users received a notice saying the @facebook.com email addresses they deployed are going away.
"We're making this change because most people haven't been using their Facebook email addresses, and we wanted to make it easier to view all your emails in one place," the message read.
The company had touted the service as a "Gmail killer" before its launch in 2010. Facebook Messages was first conceived as a tool to subsume email, text messages and chat on Facebook. As Re/Code describes it, "All of those communications would be threaded into one single communication strand, dubbed Facebook Messenger."
In an effort to win wider adoption for the service last year, Facebook created a controversy when it changed all the default personal email addresses on Facebook user profiles to Facebook.com email addresses.
Having admitted defeat, Facebook will be redirecting any user email sent to @facebook.com addresses to the primary email addresses associated with their accounts.
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