Facebook has retired its @facebook.com e-mail addresses as of Monday, according to Recode. The reason for killing the feature is, unsurprisingly, very few people were using it.

Facebook introduced the e-mail addresses in November 2010 as a way to deliver messages to users' inboxes without needing to use Facebook to originate the message. At the time, Facebook beneficently declared it was "providing an @facebook.com e-mail address to every person on Facebook who wants one."

Around two years later, the e-mail addresses were proving unpopular. Some users refused to volunteer to take one, so in their cases, Facebook made them mandatory. Facebook not only constructed the e-mail addresses out of users' existing personal IDs, but bumped users' real listed e-mail addresses from their profiles and replaced them with the Facebook.com versions in June 2012. Some mayhem ensued.

Now that Facebook is fully on the messaging train, and doubled down on that train with its $19 billion purchase of WhatsApp, it's ready to shelve e-mail. Going forward, Facebook will function as a forwarding service: messages sent to facebook.com e-mail addresses will be forwarded to the primary e-mail address on record for the relevant Facebook account.