A few weeks ago, I started receiving email from Facebook on 2 of my email IDs which I have not registered with Facebook. Initially, I thought it might be a glitch with Facebook and it would get resolved by itself. Also, I was involved in some stuff, so, did not bother to look into the issue till last week.
I discovered that on one of my email IDs, the account had yet to be verified and I had the option of verifying and locking that account via a link in the email from Facebook. I tried it and it worked. No more junk email from that ID.
The other email ID was interesting since it seemed to have been verified and attached to someone else’s account. I know this account was not compromised in any way since I would have gotten a push notification on any activity in this email account, also, it has a strong (auto-generated) password. So, the assumption here is that some glitch at Facebook caused this to happen.
On searching though the internet, I found that there were a huge number of similar cases with no apparent solution from Facebook. I even came across a Facebook page to deal with these kind of issues. I tried a couple of suggestions on some sites and found that those options had already changed within Facebook.
Ultimately, at least for me, the solution was quite simple. I tried to create an account with this email ID of mine that was being used in some other account and Facebook gave me an option to “re-claim” the ID since it was already associated with another account. I got a verification email on this ID, followed it and done!
The snapshot below shows the place where you get the message to re-claim your email ID. Since I did not capture the screen when I actually re-claimed my email ID, I tried creating an account with the first email ID that I had locked. The position of the message is the same in both cases.
As a precaution, I added this ID in my Facebook settings as an additional ID and ran into yet another Facebook bug. Although I added this as an additional email address, Facebook now shows this ID as the primary email ID in settings and will not allow me to change it. Well, we all know that no software is perfect…maybe someday Facebook will fix this one and more. For now, I have my email ID back and no more junk mail coming to me via this email ID.
I have not tried adding the ID I disabled as an additional email ID, since I really do not care about that. Perhaps I will do that sometime and see how Facebook handles that. It would be interesting to see how Facebook handles it as the account is disabled and not deleted. Logically, it makes no sense to disable the account on an invalid email ID, it should have been deleted!
I hope that this post might help some others who have the same kind of issue.
Nitin Chandra's Blog 