I'll put in my 2 cents: 'private message' is the name of the feature, to distiguish it from messages displayed to everyone on the forum. It's not a guarantee of complete privacy. IMHO it would be unwise to assume that PMs you send are private, on any forum. They're just stored as text in a database table, and every forum owner has access to the database. And if someone has access to write a plugin, they have the ability to read all the messages in the database.
For the record, I don't read anyone's PMs.
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