Ok, I was wrong that the letters were red. They are standard hyperlink colors (blue first, then purple after you've visited the system messages the first time.)
Nevertheless, it's front and center, top of the page, big bold letters, can't miss it.
As for the button that appears in the top menubar that appears on every page. We didn't have that at all for a long time. It was such that to view your old system messages you had to go to your profile and there was a link there, if my memory serves. Someone suggested that for convenience, we add a link to those messages from the menubar, so I added it.
But to make it check for new messages on each and every page you hit would substantially increase the resources the server uses to generate the page, thus making it slower. Each computational piece of work adds to the load. The changing color Tree-Mail icon costs server resources and makes the pages load slower, even if it's slow enough to not be noticeable. It's always a balancing act between good features and good performance. So the system messages do not check for new on each page - only the homepage.
