Your private inbox stores all of the messages you've received from other members, as well as the notifications you've received from various system-generated prompts, like when an admin impersonates you, another user has commented on one of your uploaded files or blog articles, someone has replied to one of your Discussion posts, etc.

To access your private inbox:

1. Navigate to your profile.
2. Click the My Inbox tab.

Inbox overview

Let's take a look at four important features of your inbox (refer to the image below):

1. Your inbox is divided into these four categories, helping to segment your messages and make finding specific types easier (the Inbox tab shows all messages, including contact requests and community invitations).
2. The search bar enables you to quickly locate specific types of messages or all messages from a specific person, or of a specific title. It's especially useful if you have a large number of messages in your inbox.
3. Here, you can mark messages as read or unread and delete selected messages (if you want to delete all messages at once, check the ALL box to select them all).
4. Click Compose to create a message to send to the private inbox of another user. Note that you can only send a private message to a single user at a time.

Manage your messages

After clicking a message to view it, you'll be able to:

• Reply to the sender
• Mark it as unread (the number of unread messages in your inbox is shown to the right of the Inbox tab)
• Delete it (you'll be prompted to confirm)

Replying to messages

Replying to a message is done inline to make it as streamlined as possible. The original message is displayed below for easy reference, and the message editor provides basic text formatting tools, like bold and italics, bulleted and numbered lists, and the ability to insert links.

When finished drafting, click Send to reply or Cancel to delete your draft and close the inline editor.