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My Facebook username is Francky and I keep receiving Facebook password reset emails. How can I avoid that?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Facebook
Date: Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 12:31 AM
Subject: Somebody requested a new password for your Facebook account
To: Franck Dernoncourt

Hi Franck,

Somebody recently asked to reset your Facebook password. Click here to change your password.

Alternatively, you can enter the following password reset code: 241041 Didn't request this change? If you didn't request a new password, let us know immediately.

Change Password

This message was sent to [email protected] at your request.
Facebook, Inc.,
Attention: Department 415,
PO Box 10005, Palo Alto, CA 94303

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  • 1
    From what email address are you receiving that email? look out for hackers and spammers! In general Facebook does not send you request to reset the password! In future if you want to delete such mails from gmail automatically follow this businessinsider.in/…
    – sree
    Jan 12, 2014 at 5:52
  • Email added in question's details. All links point to facebook.com , .i.e. no phishing.
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Jan 12, 2014 at 12:26

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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People who confuse first name and Facebook username request password reset with your Facebook username (which turns out to be a first name in your country). There is no way to prevent such e-mails, apart from creating in your e-mail client a filter based on some keywords present in such password reset e-mails.

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UPDATE (2014-02-05): Just saw this screen:

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right after

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which is the page you land on when clicking on "Click here to change your password." in the email. Not sure how often it appears.

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  • Are you saying that many users are entering the wrong username (ie. yours) and hitting the password reset when their password obviously does not work? Just curious... how often does this happen?
    – MrWhite
    Jan 12, 2014 at 12:28
  • @w3d Yes: many users are entering the wrong username (i.e. mine) and hitting the password reset. It happens twice a month on average for me (I wish you good luck if your first name is a very common one). The main issue is that I cannot distinguish genuinely erroneous requests from malicious attempts, since Facebook doesn't give the IP address of the requester.
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Jan 12, 2014 at 15:59
  • Whilst I use my real name on Facebook, my username is quite different, and reasonably unique, so I've never actually had this problem. You seem to have been "lucky" enough to get just your first name as your username. Most user's username_s appear to be made up of their first _and last names and a numeric code to make it unique. Just a thought... users can also login using their email address or phone number - so if either of these are similar then they could be prone to typos.
    – MrWhite
    Jan 12, 2014 at 16:30
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I had the exact same problem for a long time, I would get multiples of these e-mails each day on all the e-mails I had associated with facebook (I got thousands of e-mails over the course of years). My username is a very common first name - so you have an idea why this was happening.

Couple months ago (beginning of october), I found that there was an option to disable password reset lookup with username and I did just that. Basically, if you search my first name - my account does not show up anymore - and you see "Please identify this account another way". All the e-mails stopped at that point. A couple months before I had found that twitter had similar functionality, where it requires personal information - other than your username - to let you reset your password and I had been waiting to add just something similar.

Now, when I tried to find what I did to disable, I could not find the option on any facebook settings page - nor I was able to find how I was able to find this in the first place; no blog post or not a thing anywhere. I still do not get any reset e-mails. but just posting here that there is or was a way for this.

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  • Thanks, today I indeed stumbled upon such a setting clicking one more time on "Click here to change your password." in the password reset email. I don't know whether such option is accessible from Facebook settings.
    – Franck Dernoncourt
    Feb 5, 2014 at 16:08
  • I think it shows up after you click the link "Let us know immediately."
    – absolem
    Feb 11, 2014 at 3:46

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