What if privatemsg operated as part of a webmail system? You could receive private messages, and read them on the website or in an IMAP client. You could also send private messages outside of Drupal. There is another way of looking at this, too, and that is to port all of privatemsg's best features to Webmail Plus, like threaded discussions and labels. The idea, though, is to allow for internal and external messages to go to the same place.
Part of this could be receiving messages at user@drupal.org, via normal email, but this would have certain spam problems given that a spammer could easily scrape the site for usernames without needing to scrape for actual email addresses.
Another way of doing it would be to make Webmail Plus as user-configurable as a desktop client, so that it could just be a generic client for a Gmail account. Then one could use something like the Messaging framework to delegate private messages to this address.
All ideas to be discussed.
Comments
This would make you not only
This would make you not only a web site administrator, but a mail server administrator.
Do you want to be a mail server administrator?
Being a mail server administrator must be like being a podiatrist. It must pay billions, because otherwise, I can't imagine why anyone would want to do it.
The Boise Drupal Guy!
That's why I thought of the
That's why I thought of the latter option, of making it user-configurable and giving a hook to Messaging to delegate stuff to that account.
I think the main idea is that sending email to username@drupal.org would result in an email or private message sent to that user. Anything else I said is just thoughts of how to get there.