Inbox from 2 tables

Databases
1

I would like to show all new messages and invitations (friend requests) in 1 page (Inbox) mixed together like this:
Person Message title Date
Nick Hi, how are you? 25.12.2010
Linda Goint out tonight 25.12.2010
Mark Mark invited you to his network 25.12.2010

A structure of messages is the following:

Invitations will be in another table and it will have only 4 fields:
id | from | to | to_viewed | to_deleted | date | status

Please could you advise me what would be the best choice for this, how to put those tables into 1 query. Join, UNION or something else?

Thanks a lot

2

use a UNION

each of the two SELECTs in the UNION will require a join, from the from/to column to the users table to get the name