yeah that's the only new thing in v1.2... but the problem with earlier versions was that you got around 2-3 queries for each message.. so when you click "view all messages" and have like 30 messages.. i had 23 messages and i got 55 queries...
it'd be pretty messy when you get a lot of messages
EDIT: I dunno if it works... but try adding this to the template as well: $userid