Facebook has been online for over a decade now and it is one of the first social networks you sign up to. One of the core features of the social network was the Inbox where you move a conversation so as to communicate in private.
When you go to your Inbox, you normally see your chats arranged in threads dating back as long as you have been chatting with your friends but interestingly enough there is another hidden one. This hidden inbox is interesting on its own.
When you navigate to facebook.com/messages/other on desktop, the hidden inbox will be revealed to you where if you check the content, it reveals an interesting pattern: They are all spam messages. Facebook has been filtering your messages on the background and only displaying messages that it seems are best fit for you.
The amount of spam mail is rather staggering and in my case, they date back to 2008. When you keenly check on the messages, they have a common theme: If you are not friends on Facebook, the algorithms employed send the message directly to this hidden inbox. Some could be from legitimate people and other accounts are rather fishy (bots) and the algorithms seem to keep these messages at bay.This is not limited to Facebook only. Messenger too has this hidden inbox where you access it by going to settings > inbox > message requests and then tap on “see filtered requests.
It is rather cool Facebook does the spamming automatically but sometimes it may be necessary to be periodically checking on this “spam inbox” for any mislabelled messages. So check the hidden inbox and marvel at the huge number of spam messages you have received over the years while on Facebook.
