All messages, inbox, and sent messages

Have a look at how gmail works.

nothing is done for the heck of it. i do realize the decision to use this approach may not be documented well, i apologize. for the time being we are too busy developing it, maybe later we will document it. in the mean while you could try going out of your way to do the research. also it would be fenominal if you could lend us your hand in helping us document it. It is very difficult to maintain a popular module and any help we receive is very highly appreciated.

Thank you in advance.

Personally, I like the "all messages" approach and for me it makes the inbox and the sent messages redundant... but some people expect them to be there, so they were added.

I do not think users will find the current method any less useable than the alternatives. Rather, they may find them to be *more useable*. Atleast that is what I find as I cannot always remember who sent the message - me or the other person, so searching/filtering through the inbox or sent messages can be an exercise in frustration.

I'm frustrated a lot, as new privatemsg is nowhere near *any* e-mail or private messaging system I've ever seen in my local (Czech) area, and I'm afraid that the users on my site will flood me with support requests after I put this online. I don't know what gmail uses, no-one uses that in my country.

Just adding this to the discussion, to complete the range of opinions - please don't argue with me, I'm not intending to do that. I know you've enough to do already. :)

Would be very helpful if you compile list of features a "real" privatemsg system that you are familiar with provides.

You are actually hitting a point that we've been developing for a while. the Concept of 'all messages' and tags versus folders exists in this module (instead of previous features) for the sole reason of flexibility. Using the methods that *we chose* you get a much more flexible system. but what does this *mean for you* ? for you this means that you can take our flexible system and make it work the way you expect it to.

case point is we are also developing an extension to privatemsg that allows users to limit thread to a single message: This means you get the traditional privatemsg behavior of each message sent is really it's own message without any kind of discussion thread. on the same note my guess is your users have never used facebook.

also we chose tags because with tags you can emulate folders and not vise versa. However for your purposes, i think you are just confused by the *language* of "tags", if we simply change it to "folders" you would probably feel more familiar, this is not a problem that cannot be solved and it is certainly somethign i would appreciate receiving feedback on. While maintaining this module for free just because we like it, we still try to appeal to the wider public, so having said that please do not hold back your thoughts and opinions, please form them in a constructive manner and create a new issue on this project giving us your suggestion on what the language should be and how the flexibility should go and how initial user experience *before customizing it using the flexible system* should be.

Adding my ideas, per the above call for feedback:

I absolutely agree with #9, that's my impression, too. Really, 100% match.

If additional features are going to be provided later, like folder- and single-message behavior on the UI, that looks quite promising, but currently we don't have any of that, which is confusing given we're past second release-candidate (which is, by definition, supposed to be feature complete). This leads to a (temporary?) conclusion that old privatemsg module was much closer to expectations than the new one is, currently.

As for tags vs. folders - there's one important difference (apart from language): When you move messages to extra folders (like "postponed", "my favorite jokes", whatever), they disappear from regular inbox (or sent messages for that matter), so that it's small, tidy, and manageable. In the other hand, if you take the trouble to tag your messages (which is pretty much the same job as with folders), they don't move anywhere, your inbox is still the same scary shitpile of everything, unless you explicitly search for the tags. (The tags are even not shown in the listing of messages.) This makes tags quite useless in terms of tidying up. Or did I miss something here? Also, we used to have direct one-click links for folders, while tag-search requires to open a fieldset, and submit a selection from dropdown, giving look&feel very different from "navigation" to folders.

on the same note my guess is your users have never used facebook.

Very true in my case. But I think that Facebook is a quite special way of communication, and we're definitely NOT building a facebook module here. My understanding (and use case) is, that privatemsg is (just) an additional feature for any Drupal site with wider audience of authenticated users, to allow them to communicate with each other. In a style fitting to most sites, that is, including serious ones. Having private messages on a site doesn't imply the site being of chatty/facebook style.

Last note - the upgrade path is a painful point, as you currently can't have anything near the previous behavior, if moving an older 5.x site to 6.x.