Hi Lynne,
No, I don't mind you asking at all-just the opposite!

NONE of the moderators or administrators of this forum can read any private message that is not sent to them directly.  This was very important to us when we were setting up the forum.

Webmistress is the creative genius behind the look and the feel, and technical aspects of CDI.  I know for a fact that she would never go for something like this... nor would I.

By the way I can say this also with full confidence: DJM, Annie, and DJ would also NEVER have anything to do with reading people's private correspondences.
 
None of these people would be involved in CDI if it was about peeking into people's private messages.  I say this because we work together for a long time, and I know these people personally

How about the Mods PMs?

Are PMs to mods private only to that mod, or can they be read by other mods/admins? Can the email addresses of mods be changed?

Members and mods are two different species of forum user...a little clarification is a good thing.

Are the email addresses of mods changed to one central address that others, or admins can access? Say, the mod has registered a verzion address when signing up to the forum...is the email address changed to central one upon reaching mod status?

All PM's are private. Without exception.

In addition, the moderators- DJM, Annie, WM , DJ, and I are all believers in protecting confidences.

If someone communicates to any of us in confidence, that's exactly how it's held.
 

I feel comfortable speaking in such absolute terms because I know all these people personally- but any alll that weigh in are welcome.

When there is a notification of a new PM, it comes in as your email address WM...not the diamondsbylauren one or any other.
Perhaps setting a 'bot' address as the sender of notifications will eliminate this?

"coloreddiamond.info" <someone@hotmail.com>
Copied from my Gmail

Thats the from when we get PM notifications to our email. That maybe why, if someone is fowarding a notice to someone else, or trying to reply without logging in to CDI, you may end up with them than the intended member.

Thanks to EMJ's exact wording, here's what I found. First, the system must have an email to send database info. Like when it disconnects due to sun shower or hail storm or whatever. I won't operate without an email. So on step one I looked to see if the emails matched what emj wrote.

In the blank below is the hotmail address (I edited emj's post with my email for obvious spam reasons but they match). So I know the database cannot operate without an email. So I'm thinking I can put in David's but then all these things will start going to him.

So I'm thinking there had to be a place where you can choose to still send server error messages but uncheck "Enable reporting of personal messages" So I went in search. It was only easy to find due to EMJ's EXACT wording. Otherwise this would have taken all freaking day.

When I clicked on the question mark next to Enable Reporting of...., it says this:

"This option allows your users to report personal messages they receive to the administration team. This may be useful in helping to track down any abuse of the personal messaging system."

So if I uncheck this, you won't have the option of clicking some button to report spam. You'll have to pm me instead. I will uncheck this if it would make you guys feel better about pms without my email on there. And quite frankly, I'm not all that thrilled my email is being circulated on every pm.

But as you can see in that description, I cannot read them. I can track down forum info on this software. This issue is in the forum threads there and the answer is always the same from the developers, "you can't read pms". But if you guys want to see that from the developer thread, I can link to it and you can make your own decision. You can, in fact, log in join and ask them yourself. They are the geeks that make this package software and aren't linked to us at all so you'd be hearing it from the horse's mouth so to speak.

I've unchecked this so send a test pm to yourself or someone else and see if the message is still there. And you have to have a valid email because the server checks it and you have to click on a link or it will disable itself. In fact, to change the email on the database I have to put the forum in maintenance mode.

So see if that works.