Annoyed because you have to leave your e-mail inbox every time you would like to respond to someone else’s Facebook status update? Good news: the social network is testing a brand new feature that will enable you to comment on threads by e-mail.

It appears as if the new feature is currently being tested only with a very small subset of users; we haven’t seen it at the bottom of any Facebook notification e-mails yet and there are only about 4 tweets from the past couple of days mentioning the new feature.

We asked the company about the apparent bucket test, and they’ve acknowledged that they’ve started roling out the feature again for a small percentage of users after running similar brief tests a couple of weeks ago and making some improvements.

Facebook hasn’t provided more information (e.g. how they plan to prevent autoresponder messages from being posted to Walls all the time) but said it was hoping to release the new feature to all of its users in the coming weeks.