Make PMs more like threads

[JJR512]

I visit several boards in my daily internet travels. Some of these use UBB (still!). Now we all know vBulletin, as a whole, is better than UBB...but there are still a few things (OK, maybe just 1) that vB can learn from UBB.

The PM function in UBB works quite a bit differently than it does in vB. It works more like a thread (in either board system). By that I mean that if you are having a PM exchange with another user, you see all your messages as separate "posts", from start to finish. The vB way of handling this is to quote the previous post inside the reply. After a few back-and-forths, all those quotings can be difficult to follow, and they also count towards the character limit for the message.

So I'm wondering if someone can write a hack, and I realize it would be pretty extensive, to modify the whole PM system so that messages are threaded, instead of quoted. I hope that makes sense.