Private message question

[flapbreaker]

Is it normal for a "pm" to sit in your outbox after sending? I sent a couple of them and there they sit.

[Sneaks]

Normal. It sits there 'till it's read by the party you PM'd

[Pat Anderson]

What Uncle said. For contacting people who don't post more or less regularly, you have the option to email them through the site, and this may be a better choice a lot of the time. If they reply directly to your email, you have their email address and you can communicate directly outside the site...

[Da Nag]

When you send a PM, two things happen on the recipient's end.

First, an email gets sent to the address they registered with, letting them know a message is waiting for them. This email all too often gets caught up in SPAM filters, either by the user's ISP, or their own email program. AOL is by far, the worst offender here. It's also possible that a user's email address has changed since they registered here, and they've not update their profile...in which case the email gets lost in the ether...

Second, a popup window will be displayed on the users next visit here, assuming they login. However, most folks surf with popup blockers now, so unless they've included an exception for www.c-brats.com , they don't see it. Popup blockers are also the #1 cause of photo album problem reports - if you don't allow them here, you can't add photos.

Liike Pat mentioned, you can send them an email through the board. However, as with the PM notification they get sent via email, these can also get improperly flagged as SPAM and you'll never know. Which is why I usually use PM's when trying to contact somebody for the first time - you know if they've received it, as it will get moved to your "Sentbox" once they've looked at it.

One last note on PM's, which we've disclosed in the past - they are stored in the same database that runs the forum here. Neither our moderators or Mike or I have direct access to them; even if the board software included tools to look in on them, that's not something we would do. However, I do have full and unfettered access to the underlying database here. Were I of the mind to do so, or compelled to do so through some legal process, PM's are easily retrievable, and I make nightly backups of the database. This is no different than emails and your ISP, but members should be aware of it...

[TyBoo]