As well as the concern I posted recently on email inboxes not working, another way to miss messages is on a site where you don't know there is a certain messaging system and nothing is ever said to you to tell you when a message comes.
I'm always anxious that messaging systems I have not joined in Google or Yahoo because unclear about how and where to access them, don't mean there are folks sending me messages on them and thinking they have reached me. If there are, and anyone knows where I should go to check on it, tell me.
On Facebook, the email notification of messages, the way your reply links straight back into the dilaogue with that person, and the chat box you can open with anyone that forms part of your message dialogue with them - these things all cause you not often to have cause to go to "messages" on the site. When you dom you causally notice there is your inbox, and no other folder title catches your attention as being familiar from email or other sites. Your inbox contains all your familiar emssage history, and you are aware of many format changes on Facebook to the accessing of mesages, you are just relieved that it is clear now how the link to access them is on the home page, when you need it. So for a long time you don't notice that as well as your inbox you have a box called "other". Even if the "other" link subliminally passes under your site when you are accessing your inbox, when you are in the middle of busily fussing around doing something else on Facebook, you instinctively take the word "other" literally as meaning other than new messages, and suppose its content is a back file of old messages. Eventually your notice is drawn to it at an unbusy moment, and you discover what it really is - a lot of new messages you have missed, that came from folks other than existing friends, who as an excessive anti-spam measure they have directed into this inconspicuous unnoticed other box. And I found there a very welcome contact from the past, with more in common to share nbow thatn we knew in the past, that I had missed for over a year.
Everyone wake up that this "other" box exists, unless you have already, and check its contents fairly urgently!! ! Its non-prominence is a shocker.
