PM Feature

[Mark]

Sorry but I am having to disable the PM functionality. It is a technical problem and if I can get round that then it will be reinstated.

The reason if anybody is interested.

The forum needs to be able to email people for things such as lost passwords.

I don't have any mail server running and if I did the chances are emails from it would be treated as spam. This is why you always see mention of checking your spam folder when small websites mail you.

I got around that by piggybacking my gmail account so that my server could send emails from it too.

Today I got an email which I first thought was from one of you but turned out to be somebody replying to a private message. It turns out that as well as the PM via the forum the code sends an email too. Replies to such emails have hacked off enough admins for somebody to produce an unofficial fix. The problem is that the fix doesn't stop the email going out it just removes the content of the message so that stops the replies that were annoying forum admins.

So why isn't that good enough. Well piggybacking a free gmail account has some serious limitations on the number of emails it is allowed to send in a rolling 24 hour period. Exceed that and it stops working for a day meaning lost emails for lost passwords for one thing.

There are no unofficial fixes to stop it sending such emails at all. I could go crawling through the rather large amounts of code but I'd rather not - especially as I might get it wrong and stop all emails which would not be good.

So sorry but for now at least and probably indefinitely I have to disable the PM funtion. Sorry.

=== Update ===
As anybody on the board can see I found a way around this. I patched the forum software to stop it sending notification emails to therecipient that a PM was sent to them. This has the dual benefit of improving your privacy which IMO was compromised as the feature used the admin email to notify a message had been sent and without the application of a mod to the template included the message text.