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If I send an email to [email protected] then John will receive the message.

In my address book I have the Facebook ids of my friends.

Can I use those ids to send an email?
I just tried [email protected] and I received "Recipient address does not exist" (I replaced 12345 with my own Facebook id).

How to send an email knowing only the id?

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    FYI: John Doe can receive an email at [email protected] only if he enabled this feature.
    – Alex
    Jan 1, 2012 at 14:54
  • @Alex: true at time of writing, but 8 months have passed and I believe the feature has been made opt-out now.
    – nic
    Aug 4, 2012 at 17:33

3 Answers 3

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You can send emails only to people who have usernames claimed. Facebook doesn't allow sending emails to IDs.

Below's my original (wrong) answer.


Yes, the email is [email protected]. Your friends should receive them as long as you send them from an email associated with your Facebook account because the default setting is to accept messages from at least friends.

You likely didn't receive your test message because your setting is currently something restrictive. Emails to [email protected] are controlled by the same setting as all messages sent on Facebook, which is "Who can send you Facebook messages?" under How You Connect in Privacy Settings.

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You can recover a user's facebook username through the Graph API. It is one of the few bits of data you can get on a user without them having authorized your application.

Visiting http://graph.facebook.com/FACEBOOK_ID will return a JSON object containing the username, their name, and anything else they leave open to the public.

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Sending an email to a username is only effective if that particular name had the unlikely chance of being unique. If there are several identical user names facebook assigns a number following the username. To see the email address of a user, click on the ABOUT button on their home page.

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  • I did not talk about usernames. I talked about ids. Every Facebook user has a unique id. It is a number like 10098419857324.
    – nic
    Oct 2, 2013 at 6:26

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