The popular social networking website Facebook has recently taken a certitude step and without even notifying its loyal users. The site has removed everyone's email address from their profile and has replaced it with @facebook.com email address.

According to the company, they have taken the step to allow users to communicate in a more consistent manner as the new service will offer interaction between a user's message inbox and other email addresses. However, by uninformed removal of all other email addresses, including Gmail and Yahoo, Facebook has been accused by many tech analysts of deliberately promoting itself and its email service.

Incidentally, the Facebook email service was launched as early as 2010. However, as there had been no update on the announcement after that, everyone almost forgot about it.

However on June 25, when some users noticed about the sudden change in their email address on Facebook, an outcry went swirling all around the media world among the tech pundits, who questioned the logic behind the move. The most important question asked by everyone is, what purpose will it serve?

According to ZDNet, currently, the users can only receive emails to their Facebook email address and have no other advantage. Further, the emails received will show up in either in "Messages" folder or "Other" folder. The other folder is where the users receive messages from random strangers on Facebook. Moreover, it noted that @facebook.com is an unnecessary service unfairly imposed on users.

Well, this directly points to why one would use Facebook email address, when services like Gmail.com are far more advanced and are privacy-enabled than the former? About this, Facebook suggested through its blog page that the new service will handle user's privacy, through a new setting, which has been added and will provide flexibility to each email address the users have listed on their timeline.

Nonetheless, TechCrunch feels that even though Facebook has been rolled out the email service under the garb of protecting user privacy and ensuring that random people do not end up emailing you, the latest move by Facebook will only annoy users, the reason being that Facebook's new email might just make spamming even worse on the site with users finding their 'Other' inbox filled with junk messages.

However, all hope is not lost as Facebook has allowed users to restore their former email addresses if they so want. Facebook spokeswoman Jillian Stefanki said the site is also rolling out a setting that allows people to decide which email addresses to show on their pages.

Don't Care About @facebook.com? Steps To Get Back Your Old Email Id On Your Timeline:

If you are one of those who wants to get your old email address back on your Facebook profile, here's what you should do:

• Click "About" on your profile and scroll down to your email address. Click "Edit" to change them.
• Click on the circle next to your Facebook email address and change its setting to "Hidden From Timeline".
• Click on the circle next to your other email addresses and change their settings to "Shown On Timeline".
• Click the Save button at the bottom of the Edit popup (Don't forget this step).

Well, that was easy! But what do you think - is Facebook being pushy about its @facebook.com email service? Will you use it or ditch it for your old one? Let us know in the comments below.