In case you’ve noticed more notifications from Facebook in the past 24 hours, it’s probably not because you’ve suddenly become more popular. It looks like Facebook’s email notification problem is getting worse.

Facebook lets members turn email notifications on or off for more than 30 different actions on the site. These include anything from when someone sends you a message inside Facebook, invites you to an event, or adds you as friend to when someone tags you in a photo or sends you a poke. Facebook sent out the email below to anyone who is affected:

Unfortunately, the settings that control which email notifications get sent to you were lost. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.

To reset your email notification settings, go to:

http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php?notifications

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

So if you got this e-mail, it means that all of those 30-plus notification settings, including ones for individual apps you’ve installed, are all now set to “On.”

As far as data loss goes, this isn’t that big a deal. The only data that Facebook lost was preference data, not any messages, photos, videos, or the like. But preference data is also important. What if Facebook had lost everyone’s privacy settings instead of just their e-mail notification settings? It would be (slightly) more serious.

The lesson here: Don’t put anything on Facebook you’d hate to lose (or reveal to the world, for that matter).