Is anyone else bothered by SMF externalizing PMs?
Not really, because anyone can disable PM-notification-emails if they want to (but you have a point).
in the name of convenience, the PMs you send are likely being re-sent to some outside server that you almost always have no dependable details on? (As in, who is the PM recipient's mailbox provider?
I miss the days when email was easy (and not very private), but used for anything. Now, it's mostly used for automated notifications from companies, and because of privacy the actual message isn't included. I have to go to a website, login, go through 2FA because they know many users can't handle passwords, click through a few pages, and read the message. It's annoying and far too much work for something that's usually unimportant.
On Bitcointalk on the other hand, all I have to do it go to the website, my browser keeps me logged in, and I can read any PM. I don't even read the content of the email notification, because the layout is less clear than the actual PM. So I wouldn't miss it if it's gone.
(a1) The forum is already man-in-the-middled (courtesy of Cloudflare, which is an obvious intelligence-gathering nexus), so, chances are good that the forum's PMs are being collected anyway.
How cool would it be if the forum has an easy to use client side encryption (like Protonmail)? PGP involves copy/pasting messages and even if I'd want to use it, it would be the rare exception amongst thousands of PMs. Privacy should be easy for mass-adoption.
(a2) People should be encrypting sensitive correspondence.
By encrypting everything by default, any outside observer wouldn't know if it's sensitive or not. I don't remember where I read it, but: "nobody has to know I have nothing to hide".
(a3) It's very convenient to be able to entirely read incoming PMs without having to be signed-in to Bitcointalk.
CTRL-N > b ENTER > click MESSAGES. The slowest part is loading the messages (with hundreds of pages). Unless you're not signed-in already, but I don't really see a reason for that on my own computer.
Basically, e-mailed PM notifications would remain as-is, except that the "The message they sent you was:" part would no longer be included.
I sent you a PM from
LoyceBot2, just in case you've never seen what the email looks like:
The message they sent you was:
(The body is omitted from this email because the sender is a newbie. Check the forum to read it.)
That may be close enough to what you're suggesting, and it's already implemented (for Newbie-senders only).