Face­book rolled out their new email fea­ture recently. I got my “you have an email account now” mes­sage a few days back. So I’ve been play­ing around with it.

Refer to the pic — if you double-click on it, you can see it larger in another win­dow at actual size.

a) This is what appears at the top of the Face­book browser win­dow after you click on the “Mes­sages” link near the top of your left home page col­umn. A dif­fer­ent aspect to hav­ing this fea­ture acti­vated is that when you click on “New Mes­sage” in that win­dow or via the Mes­sages icon on your Face­book home page, you can put someone’s email in the “To” field. And even if the per­son isn’t a Face­book user, they will get your mes­sage. (That is an illus­tra­tion of how Face­book wants to be your mes­sage cen­ter. If you use Face­book con­stantly, that might be a help­ful fea­ture. I don’t, so it isn’t.)

b) This is what a sam­ple email looks like as sent from Face­book. It shows all your Face­book con­ver­sa­tions, whether they were sent through Face­book email or not. As you can tell, my wife and I do not talk much via Face­book. (Rest assured — we do talk a lot in real life.)

c) “Ser­vice Unavail­able” is what is shown when I type “f” in my Fire­fox browser address field. (That’s how I nor­mally get to Face­book.) And “ser­vice unavail­able” is my brief sum­ma­tion of Face­book email.

> The Search Mes­sages fea­ture does not work.

> There are no fold­ers or ways to orga­nize your messages.

> I did not try out the mobile mes­sag­ing aspect, so I can’t com­ment on that.

So in short, do not stress out if you haven’t received your Face­book email account yet. You are not miss­ing much. It’s a good sup­ple­men­tal thing, if you’re a heavy Face­book user, but oth­er­wise, no big deal.