Language is an inherently social pursuit. Over the past two and a half years, some 80,000 messages have come and gone through your collective inboxes. The next time you pay your inbox a visit, you might notice a change of scenery. With this site update, the inbox has been overhauled to make messaging more easy, fun, and organized for everyone.

Let's meet the new inbox.

Conversations

All of your messages are organized into conversations. Each conversation is a single topic or thread. Conversations are listed in your inbox by newest to oldest, and show how many unread messages you have in each. You can turn email notifications on or off for individual conversations. This defaults to your profile setting.

When viewing a conversation, you will see the latest 25 messages. You can load previous messages, or load new messages as they come in, making conversations function much like a private chat.

Conversations that haven't been updated in 7 days or more will be moved to your message archive, keeping your inbox clean with only your ongoing conversations. Archived conversations will move back to your inbox whenever a new message is posted. You may also manually archive conversations.

If you're the conversation starter, you have the ability to lock or unlock the conversation to new messages. You also have some additional options when, let's say, your conversation has more than two people.

Group Messaging

Conversations can be used for more than just private messaging. To start a new group conversation, click the "New Conversation" button in your inbox and search for the site members you want to add. Each conversation can have up to 10 participants at a time. For technical reasons, email notifications are automatically disabled in conversations with 4 or more participants.

If you're the conversation starter, you can add or remove members from the conversation at any time. Note that any members who join a conversation will be able to see all of its messages.

You cannot add other members to conversations that are marked as "private". The "private" setting ensures that no one else except the initial members of a conversation will see it. Private conversations cannot become open. If you want to start an open conversation, you must do so from your inbox.

Notifications

Some types of messages that once inhabited the old inbox now have a new home under Notifications. These include forum post alerts, question board alerts, and gold or item gifts. Notifications will stay in your notification box for 7 days after being read.

Out(box) with the old, in(box) with the new

The old inbox and outbox are still accessible for a limited time. After July 20th, the old inbox and outbox will be removed, and all old messages will be deleted. If you have any messages you want to keep, copy them from your inbox before this time.

Profile Pictures

If you're still sporting the default profile picture, there is now a gallery of avatars to choose from when editing your profile. Special thanks to community member Ahmuldein for providing some of these images!

If you have any questions or thoughts about the new inbox and conversations, drop a comment below. As always, you can post any feedback you have to the Site Discussion Forum. Farewell for now, and enjoy the update!