OK, that makes sense and I sort of agree with you. If they're called private, then many people will assume a degree of privacy from them, which would I suspect include not sending blind copies to others and similar.

But I've never thought of them as private messages, merely on site messages. So I'll talk it through with Denise when I get a chance, and consider rewording the relevent FAQs to remove the term private.

The feature itself doesn't use the term private messages anywhere I can see, it's just documentation that does. I've found two, How do I send people messages on Dreamwidth? and How do I protect my privacy on Dreamwidth? (Part 2), that's from a cursory search, I'll do a more thorough scan when I've time, if you see any more let me know.

Not perhhaps a long term fixx, but there's going to need to be a discussion about what people want the site to offer in terms of features like messages, so we either call them PMs and keep them private, or we call them something else and don't give people false expectations, and move them towards a different functionality.

Definitely can't call them email though, they're not email, they don't follow email protocols.