Thanks Brandon - that sounds helpful.

Still, I think this does need to be addressed directly. I am not sure how any DNN site can use the messaging system at all before users and admins can control message settings. I think this comes up in two distinct ways:

First, AFAIK, there is no way for me to hide myself from people finding my account; names still are searchable for the send a message thing. But, names themselves can be dangerous. Sure, Facebook always makes it possible to find somebody's name... but not every site is Facebook. What about somebody running a site for abused women? What about the site for an addiction group? What about almost every single other site that doesn't directly do social networking as it's primary purpose? People either have to provide fake information or delete their account to stay private.

Until users can hide their name, the messaging system is just a huge privacy hole and I would never recommend any site turn it on.

Second, if users can't disable emails from messages, they have no ability to opt out of messages from your site without deleting their account. This is technically probably OK with CAN-SPAM stuff, but it certainly doesn't follow the spirit of the law even if it does the letter. More importantly, though, it is just annoying for your users. The potential for abuse is likewise tremendous. 

Personally, I think those two features really should have been built right into the core before the feature was ever made public. I am not trying to be hard on the team or anything - the messaging stuff is genuinely cool and I am excited about the social components in DNN. Still, not every site wants to be facebook, so it's critical that things can be controlled and disabled by users and admins as needed. I treat the messaging system and the social components as if they're in beta mode... Because you can't reasonably activate them on any site until some critical updates are made.

Mike

I agree that this is a very important consideration; at the moment, the only way to modify this functionality is to replace the core MemberDirectory module.  This is clearly not optimal, and in addition to users being able to control their own visibility, it would be very useful to be able to inject custom logic at runtime to control this behavior.

While this is not available out-of-the-box, it is fairly easily achieved with a little bit of additional work.  At my DNNWorld session I'll demonstrate how it is possible to generate notification e-mails that look like this:

Note that each such e-mail has an unsubscribe link (delivery is driven off of the Subscribers role).  My point here is not to plug my session, but rather to demonstrate that with a bit of creativity that much of this functionality is already achievable.  My hope is that, over time, some of these features will slowly be baked back into the core platform.