Have You Checked Your “Other” Mail Folder on Facebook?

Apparently, I don’t see things until they are glaring me in the face for a few years. I didn’t notice that in my Facebook Inbox there was a separate folder called “Other”.  

I admit it. I saw a post with someone referring to the Other folder a few weeks ago and forgot about it. I saw another person mention it last week and thought about checking out...but I didn't. It took a third time for me to actually go in and check. To my surprise, I found 30 messages in there! Though most were spam, several of them were very important.

I thought this had to be a new Facebook roll-out, until I saw that many of the messages were well over a year old.  It turns out that Facebook added this feature back in 2011. Really? Where was I? Evidently, I have been staring at my computer screen blankly for a few years. Maybe I need to check on that.

Facebook filters out messages to our Inbox in two different ways. You can choose between a Basic Filtering setting and a Strict Filtering setting.

According to their help page, Basic Filtering allows mail to go to your regular Inbox if sent from friends, friends of friends and people you might know… anything else goes to the Other box. The Strict Filtering setting is generally set to accept messages from friends only.  I have received messages from people outside of my list of friends, so I think their program makes the judgment call about who we should and shouldn’t know. 

Also, Facebook does NOT send notifications for mail in your Other box, so it is up to you to check it on your own.

Maybe they are just helping us. I thought that for about 3.5 seconds, until I looked up the rules and saw this on the last line of the Facebook help page: 

“Additionally, someone you're not connected to on Facebook may pay to ensure their message is routed to your inbox instead of your Other folder.” 

Yes, that does say a person can pay Facebook to put a message in your Inbox. Apparently, it costs $1 and a user is limited to doing that once per week, so that keeps spammers at bay.  However, correct me if I am wrong, but doesn’t that sound a teeny bit like bribery at your expense or making your friends pay a ransom to send you mail? Pay up if you want to talk to your old childhood friend ever again… Well, I guess that is whole different article.

Here is how you find your “Other” folder:

• Go to your messages folder. You can get there from either the side bar of your homepage or the notification window at the top tool bar.

• When that is open, you will see on the top, in fine print, that there are two folders. Inbox and Other. 

• Select “Other” and weed through huge sea of spam and you might find a hidden treasure.  It takes a while to load them all as you scroll down.

• You might also have the sudden realization at this point that messages you have sent to people over the years may not have been ignored. A serious amount of hope could possibly be regained at this very moment.

I thought I was the only one who didn’t know this, until I found out that many of my friends had no idea either. In fact, in doing my research for this blog, I also found there was an article posted about it in the past few days on ABC News. I guess that truly means I am not the only one.  Maybe this is an example of collective thinking.  Okay… probably not.  Most likely, it’s just viral social media at work.

Let us know if you find something exciting in your Other folder beyond the endless pile of spam stating that you won 5 zillion dollars from Scamlandia or that some royal prince’s kingdom on Farce Island is in great danger and needs your financial help.

What are you waiting for? Go find out if you have hidden treasures of your own!