Morning, everyone.
We just wanted to pick up on sunshinecake's point up there ^^ because we think we might be able to reassure you and it's perhaps something that has confused or concerned others, too.
You said I had a PM message saying removed at the poster's request quite a while ago too. Given some of my PMs are extremely personal I feel a bit alarmed and upset. Seems MNHQ expect loyalty but don't give it back.
We just wanted to reassure you that the reason we do very occasionally look in on PMs (and it is vanishingly rarely) is precisely because we want to look after our loyal and genuine members. If someone has just joined and posted a begging thread, for example, we want to be able to protect our members from that if we can so we might check PMs in an instance like that to see if they are asking for or accepting cash offers etc. We've also had new users joining and spamming members with PMs and again, we'd then look at what they'd sent out to see if it broke guidelines, if it had been reported to us.
So yes, on rare occasions like that, it is something we would do to check if someone were here to troll or beg or spam but usually only when it were reported to us. And we'd have no reason at all to randomly look at genuine users' PMs. We wouldn't want to do that and nor would we have the time, to be honest.
It is also worth knowing that lots of users delete their PMs once they've been read as a matter of course and that will also delete it from your inbox, so having deleted messages these days is pretty normal and doesn't mean there's anything nefarious going on at all. It's likely that the person who sent it to you deleted it. And of course you can do that with all your messages, too, if you don't want them hanging around.
Hope that puts a few minds at rest, anyway. Do shout if you've any further questions.