As the title of this post says, who actually ‘owns’ a private message?
Is it:-
a) the author i.e. the person that sent it,
b) the person that recieves that message and has it in their Inbox,
c) TrucknetUK i.e. Directors etc etc.
The reason that I ask is that at least one message has ‘disappeared’ from my Inbox. I know that it was sent to me by a person whose ‘status’ on these boards seems to have changed (today, I think) but how does that equate to it being removed from my Inbox??
My instinctive feeling is that that message was ‘mine’ so how can it be taken from me, let alone the fact that I understood it to be private as in PM = Private Message.
Are all our Private Messages available to be read by Mods, Admin etc??
Once a private message/email has been sent, it becomes the legal property of the recipient (ie. you).
Private messages/emails must not - under any circumstances - be reproduced on the forums unless unless you have the express permission from both the sender and the recipient.
Ok…several questions to be answered here…I’m going to deal with them in reverse order, if I may.
First off, I just want to reiterate once again that the Mods and Admins of this board - myself and Rikki included - have NO access to other members’ PMs. We deliberately chose to have our database set up that way.
Next thing to talk about is how the PM system works. It basically (and I’m simplifying this here, since we don’t need to go into the technical intricacies of a dynamic PHP system) follows several stages…:
The Sender types the message and hits “submit”.
The message then goes to the Sender’s OUTBOX.
The Receiver is notified of a new message’s arrival. When he clicks on his PM INBOX it will be shown on the list. But it is not actually there yet as it has not left the Sender’s OUTBOX.
The Receiver clicks on the new message to read it. At this point the message leaves the Sender’s OUTBOX and is transferred to the Receiver’s INBOX. At the same time a copy automatically goes to the Sender’s SENTBOX.
This means that several things can happen along the way which may interupt the process, or which can be useful:
If the Sender deletes the message from his OUTBOX before the Receiver clicks on it, it will appear to “vanish”. In reality, as you can see above, it never actually got delivered.
If the Sender edits the message in his OUTBOX, the edited version is what the Receiver sees.
You can tell whether a message has been read by the Receiver by seeing if it is still in your OUTBOX, or whether it has transferred to your SENTBOX.
Bearing all of the above in mind, I suspect that the reason your PM vanished is because when the member who sent it was deleted, their PM boxes would all have been deleted as well - including the OUTBOX and it’s contents. (see above).
If you had already read the message (as opposed to just seeing it listed in your INBOX), then I can only speculate that something similar has happened…in which case we have both learnt something new about the software which powers these boards.
Whilst the software probably could be modified to overcome this, it would cost a great deal of money and take a huge amount of time to accomplish something of very minimal benefit in the grand scheme of things, so I’m afraid we just can’t justify it.
That just leaves the question of ownership of PMs. It’s a difficult one to call, really…but personally I would say that a message is the “property” of the Sender until it leaves his OUTBOX (when the Receiver clicks on it), at which point it becomes the “property” of the Receiver. However, this only applies within the limitations of the software…just as e-mail can be lost if the software or servers used when hosting accounts crashes/ is hacked/ finds a bug/ etc…therefore I would suggest that you copy and paste anything of particular importance to your own hard drive/ floppy for safekeeping, just as you would with important e-mail.
Lucy:
Bearing all of the above in mind, I suspect that the reason your PM vanished is because when the member who sent it was deleted, their PM boxes would all have been deleted as well - including the OUTBOX and it’s contents. (see above).
If you had already read the message (as opposed to just seeing it listed in your INBOX), then I can only speculate that something similar has happened…in which case we have both learnt something new about the software which powers these boards.
Thanks for the reply Lucy.
I can confirm that I had read the message and it was still in my Inbox. I was going to move it to my Saved Box once I had made a note (or backup copy) of the info contained in that message.
I assume that now puts us in the bracket of having all ‘learnt something new’ but my message and info is lost forever??
What also needs to be considered is that a message in the Inbox automatically disappears if the senders account is cancelled or removed as there is no member listing to tie the message to in the database.
So if you had recieved the PM then the member who sent it had his account suspended the PM would disappear
Yes Davey, that is what seems to have happened but I think it’s wrong.
Really I think the message should stay in your Inbox; all the posts made the person who’s account has been deleted remain on show, just as ‘guest’. If one of my PM’s had suddenly changed to ‘guest’ from their name then I would’ve had some notice and warning before losing the info.
At least it’s come to light now so the people that need to be, are aware.
however without completly re-writing the code for the MYSQL database and the forums (which is totally beyond my capabilities, and to get done by a programmer beyond our finances) i am afraid we will have to make do with the limitations
I understand that Rikki and i’m not having a sad-on about it (if it sounds like that, sorry, it’s not meant to).
More than anything I think this thread should hopefully bring to light a ‘wee glitch’ in the system and encourage users to be more efficient at backing-up their messages…which I didn’t!
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Thanks! It means a lot 
