Integrated Private Messaging to Users

If you try to use Confluence to build a community outside of an business organization (imagine a big Open Source project of people all over the place), there's no integrated way with Confluence to be able to send messages to other specific Confluence users. Having an integrated system means people can protect their privacy and you don't need to maintain yourself some page of contact information which would require people to leave the application.

Here's how I'd envision it being implemented featurewise:

• You click on an envelope by a person's name (on anything they've written/modified/etc) or from their Confluence profile page to send them a private message.
• When a person logs in, their Dashboard should mention that they have new messages with a link to view their mailbox.
• There should also be some sort of status-dependent icon at the top right (where the history/profile/print etc icons) are that gives a link to your mailbox. If you have mail, the icon looks obviously different than if your mail is all read.
• If the person is subscribed to notifications for the site overall, that should include a summary of any new mailbox messages.
• It might also be nice to have a separate, independent notification of new messages. That is, you don't need to subscribe to the site notification, you can just opt to be e-mailed (if you've provided an address) a notification that you have a new private message in Confluence.
• A user can access their mailbox from the icon mentioned earlier (top right of the screen) or from the profile page or from the Dashboard.
• Once in the mailbox, they are presented with a list of mail messages, ordered by date sent, with some sort of indicator for read/unread, message title, and from information. Thread visualization/grouping might be nice. It might also be nice to have checkboxes beside each message (with a select/unselect all!) where you can do mass deletions from this screen.
• When a user clicks on a message to read it, they have some message options: reply, reply with quote, delete, forward to external e-mail address. These work as you would expect.
• The administration screen should have some configuration options for how many messages a user can have or how much space they can take up or how long they're kept around for. You might need parameters for more than one of these and the mailboxes are pruned nightly depending on which one they're closest to at the time or something. Not sure about the logistics here, but I'm sure something is needed to keep it from ballooning horrendously.

I imagine this could be implemented maybe as some kind of plug-in, but I'm not sure. I think many of the tools you need to do this sort of thing are probably already written because:

• there is already a way to write content and format it
• there is already a mechanism for threading messages, etc.
• there is already sme kind of GUI for looking at mail messages and managing them (although I haven't used this myself)