When Zynga introduced the in-game inbox in Mafia Wars, players embraced it wholeheartedly. It made accepting gifts and help requests for the Crime Spree much easier than the old way of going to the Facebook Request page to accept each gift item or request.

Then early this week Zynga change the Pending Requests how the in-game inbox works. Before, the envelope icon shows how many requests you have. These days you’ll see an exclamation mark whenever you have a request.

When you click on it, a pop-up will state that the Facebook requests have been moved and you must accept all your pending gifts and requests from there. Then there’s an Accept Pending Gifts button that will direct you to the Facebook Requests Page.

Maybe this is Zynga’s solution for the glitch where players can accept a gift request twice. They can’t make a fix, so they disabled the in-game inbox and make the players do it the old-fashion way. This is a hassle especially if you have a lot of gifts to accept.

Hopefully this is only temporary because the inbox within Mafia Wars was a good thing. It was a convenient way of accepting gifts from your Mafia members.