But fret not because David Marcus, the man who handles Facebook Messenger has finally come to the rescue. In a Facebook post , Marcus announced that the ‘other folder’ will cease to exist. But this does not mean strangers cannot approach you, as the messages from people not in your friends list will now be viewed as ‘message requests’.

Source: Facebook

Message requests will allow people to search a person’s name on Facebook and send them a message, which will show up as a message request. The choice of accepting the request for a conversation lies with the user, as the sender will not know if the message has been read or not.

David Marcus clearly laid out the rules in his post stating, “If you’re friends on Facebook, if you have each other’s contact info in your phone and have these synced, or if you have an existing open thread, the new messages from that sender will be routed to your inbox. Everything else will now be a message request, minus spam attempts that we will continue to ruthlessly combat.”

While some say that this will allow more strangers to find their way into others’ inboxes and harass users, there are those welcoming it as people tend to miss out on some connections that might not be unwanted, but end up getting dumped in the Others folder.