Facebook is making it easier for strangers to send you messages

Phone numbers are dumb. Once someone has yours, you can’t stop them from contacting you. Someone might want you to call them, but if you don’t have their random string of digits, you can’t. And you could miss something extremely important if a person you’ve never met really needs to reach you. Facebook Messenger has a plan to fix all that. And it’s born from the ashes of one of the social network’s worst products ever. Today, Messenger is killing off the dysfunctional “Other Inbox”. It was where Facebook messages went to die if they were sent by someone who wasn’t your friend or friend-of-a-friend. Few people knew it existed. Fewer ever checked it. And it wasn’t even accessible from Messenger’s iOS or Android apps. A friend of mine once received a Facebook message from his long-lost brother he was separated from at birth 30 years ago in Vietnam. But he didn’t see the message for six months because it went to his Other Inbox. It took a LinkedIn request before he realized what he was missing. Thankfully, that shouldn’t happen anymore. Rolling out globally starting today is Facebook’s replacement for the Other Inbox which it calls “Message Requests”. It means all someone needs in order to contact you is your name, but you have control over whether they can contact you again.