I've seen two separate recent reports (by Ray Bell and Monican) that they can't use private messages due to lack of email verification, and that the attempted email verification didn't work.
@Peter: any insight / fix?
Email verify for private messages doesn't work?
yes still not working 
thanks for bring this up.
Found the bug. Pushing a fix for it now. Give it a few minutes and the message centre should work.
The verification itself was working - just the messages page was not detecting the fact that they were verified.