Hi all - thanks for raising this and we’re really sorry that it took you unawares. It’s something that we put in place in the run up to GDPR, because we took the view that in situations like this, we need to privilege the right of users to delete their data.
In the case of PMs, messages by poster A can often contain personally identifying information about poster B. Because we’re putting poster B’s right to delete her data above other concerns, when poster B deletes a PM that was sent to her, the PM is deleted from our servers and will disappear from poster A’s ‘sent’ folder .
Likewise, if poster B de-registers or asks us to delete all her data, we think she will rightly expect PMs between herself and poster A to be deleted from our servers. That means they’ll also disappear from poster A’s ‘sent’ folder.
It’s a bit of a compromise I’m afraid. One thing we can do, though, is to make it much clearer at the point of deletion that removing messages from your inbox will also remove them from the ‘sent’ folder of the person who sent them.
@LassWeADelicateAir - please let us know if PMs continue to disappear. It may be that the sent messages are part of a long conversation - and if the author deletes their part of the conversation, then yes, the messages will be removed.
@ R0wantrees - PMs being added to a thread is definitely not right and we’ve raised it as a matter of urgency with the tech team. Please could you drop us a line to [email protected] with the thread that it happened on, to give them a steer?
Many thanks, M.