As a result of this thread when I went away for the weekend I updated my 'last visit' and tried to use the messages since last visit feature. The biggest problem was the 90 second refresh. It seems to be refreshing almost constantly. I think it used a good part of my 90 seconds just to load the page so I only had a short time to read the subjects & decide about reading. I tried changing the refresh to 10 minutes, but this setting was back to 90 sec. when I returned from reading a message of interest.

Wouldn't you lessen the load on the whole system by not checking automatically at all? Or make automatic checking an option that can be turned on by those who want to use it that way.