Facebook Friend Causes Junk Email for Life

Thursday, June 19th, 2008
at 9:44pm

One of my wonderful Facebook friends, who I actually met first in real life (he goes to my school) is social enough to send out “extremely funny” messages to all of his friends on Facebook. Truthfully, I didn’t even want to see the joke he sent to his 20-something friends in the first place, but one message is enough to ignore.

One of Facebook’s cute features allows one to have large threads that multiple people can reply to, even if some of the initial recipients of the first message are not added as a friend to any other person in the thread. This could translate into the thread continuing to be replied to for months, which is what is really bothering me.

Facebook doesn’t really want to help stop what it, in effect, spamming of friends. You could consider this feature to be some type of friend spamming mechanism, since every time a member of the message thread replies, you get an email from Facebook announcing it. As I found out, there isn’t even a way to unsubscribe from the thread – so if your friend’s friends are abnormal and find that a multi-recipient thread is the way to chatter about useless topics, there isn’t even a way to pull yourself out of the madness.

Here’s an email exchange I had with Facebook support:

from Facebook Support

reply-to Facebook Support

to ****@gmail.com

date Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 7:26 PM

subject Re: INBOX: A thread is sending me unwanted messages

mailed-by facebook.com

Hi Michael,

Unfortunately, the ability to remove yourself from a thread is not yet available. I am sorry for the inconvenience. Thanks for the suggestion. We will certainly keep it in mind as we continue to improve the site.

Thanks for contacting Facebook,

Jackson

User Operations

Facebook

—–Original Message to Facebook—–

From: Michael Perlman (****@gmail.com)

To: info@facebook.com

Subject: INBOX: A thread is sending me unwanted messages



User id: 516******

Description of problem: One of my Facebook friends sent a message to all of his friends (including me) at the time. Now, people originally brought into the thread are still replying, and I continue to receive unwanted messages (and emails from Facebook telling me about the replies, as a result). Is there a way that I can be removed from the thread?

Browser: Opera/9.50 (Windows NT 5.1; U; en)



—–End Original Message to Facebook—–

Supposedly, Facebook is known for being super-sensitive to some types of misuse of the site (case in point: Robert Scoble was suspended from Facebook for testing an unreleased data-mining tool from Plaxo, and many others have been kicked for sending a few too many messages or having too many friends), but from my experiences, they are way off bat in terms of keeping users from annoying each other.

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7 Comments

joseph

October 23rd, 2008
at 3:42pm

Yeah, that’s crap. I can’t stand the facebook notification emails.

You can, however setup a filter in gmail to delete them if they’re from facebook.

Michael Perlman

October 23rd, 2008
at 4:55pm

@joseph: That’s exactly what I did – it was seemingly the only way to end the madness. Fortunately, the conversation appeared to have ended within a few more weeks.

Tyler

January 6th, 2009
at 11:38pm

This is still an issue, and now I get endless replies from my 15 year old step sister and all her friends about her 16th birthday party in June!

The gmail filter is what i’m doing to solve this too, but geez facebook get with it, I even de-friended my step sister to make the incesant 15 year old rambling stop but that didn’t help.

Oh and btw her and her friends put their age as 18 to get on FB, even though in their school section it says graduating HS in 2012. So. Annoying. Esp since I’ve been on FB since it uh like came out.

Louise

April 8th, 2009
at 9:24pm

After about a dozen of these sorts of episodes, I removed myself from Facebook, vowing never to return. Not only was the spam annoying in its quantity, the quality of the “communications” from “friends” was just junk. “Charles is a cheetah! What animal are YOU?” Jeez, I’m 45 years old. Who CARES about these silly games?

Thanks for leaving your link on our blog; I’ll be sure to check back on yours again!

Michael Perlman

April 12th, 2009
at 12:23am

@Louise: You’re probably just thinking of the home page – I was getting messages (and emails in my personal inbox) from people who I never even added as friends!

Scrz

May 25th, 2009
at 2:10am

You can turn of the “notifications on e-mail” function under setings on the facebook site. No more mails from facebook in your g-mail inbox. You still get the new message notification inside facebook however which is annoying too.

Aaron

December 12th, 2009
at 7:31pm

Yes, you can turn off email notifications, but you won’t ever stop getting messages in your FB inbox. It really pisses me off that Facebook still hasn’t given a feature that lets you unsubscribe from group emails.