We've updated (and hopefully improved) the messaging interface.

Ever since we added self-post replies to everyone's inbox a few months ago, we've realized that there is a need to better organize the inbox. We don't want to punish users by making their inbox completely unusable for 24 hours just because they made a particularly interesting self post or comment. So, for starters, we added this to the top of the inbox:
Unfortunately, for the moment, "post replies" from before this patch are going to still appear in the "comment replies" tab (we had to make some changes to our data model to accomomdate the new organization which will be expensive to back-compute).

Since the new tabs aren't of much use if everything is marked as read as soon as you view your inbox, we've added a "mark as unread" button below comments and messages you want to save for later, and we've added a new preference:
This preference will remain enabled by default, so if you're not interested in the new tabs, nothing will change about the behavior of your inbox. When you disable this checkbox, messages will stay as unread until you click on them (anywhere). The majority of the time a message in your inbox needs to be replied to, so responding to it, or voting on the comment seemed natural triggers to to use for marking the message as read. Errant clicks or reassessments can be fixed with the "mark unread" button.

This is the first in a round of updates for messaging that we're hoping to get out as they are finished (threaded messages and multiple recipients anyone...?), so treat this as a work in progress.

Overview for people who like the inbox exactly the same as it is now and are worried about the whereabouts of their cheese. We added a subtle gray background to unread messages and "mark as unread" to read messages. Please forgive us.