Marco did e-mail me the plugin to remove the link when I proved to him that my board already informs members their pms may be read. I just thought everyone should know. I will install the workbench now when I get the opportunity. Thanks Marco.

Your welcome, please click Install once you have it running (that should be in 2 minutes from now ;))

Marco, have a stray thought/question that your hack got me thinking about. Not sure if it's in the scope of what you're doing here, or if I should be posting in mod requests, but I'll start here.

One of the things my users ask for most frequently is more email-like handling of the to and from fields. Particularly in the case of multiple recipients.

Ideally, if I send to 5 different people, it's an open conversation with these folks, and in order for them to respond to the group, I have to start the PM with "to: user1, user2, user3, user4, user5" so they might copy that on the response.

In a perfect world, if I put 5 people in the to field, then all 5 see the other 4 names as well, and of course myself as the sender. Then they have the option to reply, or reply to all. This would create a need for a bcc field of course, in the event you want some or all not to see who else is being PMed, but that would really only function the standard way vB handles this (hiding everyone else but the sender and recipient), so I assume it wouldn't require any new code.

A step up functionally speaking to that would be being able to PM to usergroup (primary or secondary) as well, effectively enabling closed discussion groups between different project teams (I have a community driven site), and the like.

Is this practical? Is it a potential feature of your workbench? Or *gulp* are these features available in another hack I've simply managed to overlook?

As long as I had it all fresh in my head, wanted to ask here. Mostly because the notion of one complete workbench that overhauls PM functionality seems personally more appealing than several different little ones that might overlap and/or conflict.

Another notion I had that sort of speaks to the privacy issue, is affording users the option of encrypting PMs. Giving another layer of privacy and protection would make it a lot easier to have some userbases digest the reality (with this hack) that admins can read their PMs. Obviously that would mean admins having 'content' on their site that they have zero access to, but it could be an optional feature.

I suspect I'm way off base talking about these here, as your modification seems to speak more to the administrative side of things than the user experience, but wanted to give it a shot. ;)

Thank you for your feedback, all suggestions are welcome and i must say i really like the CC/BCC handling. (Actually vB = BCC, you want to add CC). I will give it some thoughts and if possible i will add it.

Closed discussion groups i am not so sure about yet.

Encryption is a different thing. Since 2 (or more) members must be able to encode/decode it, some encryption keys must be exchanged, that could be intercepted by the admin again, and thus given false sense of security. There have been more threads about encrypting/obfuscating private message.

PM Report is both User/Admin, i am planning to make a User Search PM function, but the needed hooks where not available in RC2. So i am still planning on having a go at that too. More might follow.

Appreciate your receptiveness and responses. I see your point on encryption. I suppose if users were savvy enough, and really wanted to, they could use something like GnuPG to encrypt and decrypt in text windows on their own machines. Not something that needs server-side support, and frankly, if they need that much privacy, better to take it to email, or OTR-enabled GAIM, etc. Something off-site.

The to/cc/bcc stuff would be a dream come true. More than half the emails I send are to multiple recipients, where the ongoing discussion is something we all want the others in the loop for. Invariably, someone forgets to include everyone else, so the convo fragments, and it gets difficult to keep things linear.

Perhaps instead of PMing usergroups, people (admins) could set PM aliases for groups? Something like 'game_preview_team' is defined as 'user1, user2, user34, user765', where any PMs sent to 'game_preview_team' goes to all those people (I run a college athletics site). Although I suppose functionally speaking, that might be no different than mailing usergroups, and might require users to be created for each alias? I have no idea, not a coder at all. :)

The big thing was definitely the cc/bcc stuff, and I'm ecstatic that it's something you might consider.

Outstanding, Users being able to search their own PM folder would be a terrific feature. I just switched over to fulltext searching down to 2 character terms on my forums, and everyone is loving that. Extending it to PMs would really save some time.

How 'bout something like Erwin's vB mail checker? Have members input server info, and just use the username as a forward (unless you actually have an account on my site, like sovereign @ alliancemodding.com then you could turn forwarding off). Cool hack! Keeping updated on this one...

Report does not work. It gets me a no permission error when I click on the report button on PMs.

Could you provide me with a test account and a link please.

I'm PMing it to you right nooow.