Facebook Shuts Down @Facebook Email System

Posted by timothy on Tuesday February 25, 2014 @05:11AM from the shot-in-the-dark-went-wild dept.

First time accepted submitter beaker_72 writes "The BBC are reporting that Facebook will end their email system which provided users an @Facebook.com email address in March. The official line from Facebook is that not many people have been using the service. Is that really the case or have they found it too challenging to monetize that part of their service? Did users stay away from this 'service' because they've become more savvy and recognized it for what it was — another way to harvest their data? Or is it the case that the market is currently saturated with free webmail services and there wasn't room for another one?"

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Re: Because people already have E-mail addresses? by stdarg · 2014-02-25 06:44 · Score: 4, Informative

Not only did they have a better interface, they offered a ridiculous (at the time) amount of space. I used to use Yahoo mail, then they imposed a cap of 2MB (I think), and you had to pay to up that to 10MB. Gmail came out swinging at 1GB.
Re: Because people already have E-mail addresses? by loufoque · 2014-02-25 07:40 · Score: 4, Informative

No.
Gmail took off because it provided a free POP3/IMAP email service with a large storage capacity.