Is email private?

Hello, and welcome!

No one can see your email, except moderators- and we make it a policy to never email members directly. We will send a private message through the forum, first. This is an anonymous forum because of the nature of the subjects here- mental illness- and we strictly enforce that as much as possible- we don't allow sharing of personally identifying information in open forum. We can't control what people do via the private messaging (because, 'private'), but we can and do edit out and admonish members that get too sharey about themselves in open forum. This is all covered in both the forum rules and the privacy policy, links to which are at the bottom of every page:

From the Forum Rules:

Sharing private information, about you or any other person, that makes you or anybody else recognizable is not permitted on the forums and will be removed immediately if brought to our attention.

From the Privacy Policy:

User´s privacy is important to us. However Psychforums.com collects private information (e.g. email, ip addresses) from our users when they visit the site or register. This information is not shared with any other company or organization (except possibly with the Authorities). The email can be used by the mod team to contact a user directly or to send notification to the users. The ip are used by the moderation team to analyze and possibly block users that are not behaving correctly on the forum.

And, no we can't always know, and because other members can't see your email, it wouldn't really matter anyway I suppose, but technically, we also mandate members use unique email addresses:

From the Forum Rules again:

You must create an email that you dedicate only for your interactions with psychforums.com and protect this mail account with a different password than your other mail accounts.

I use an email account that I associate only with Psych Forums, and that also goes for my user name; and I always advise members to do the same. Because we're dealing with mental health, and we want to protect members not just from ramifications of being personally identifiable, but also from each other (because, 'mental illness'), we have rules like the ones I quoted above. So we officially make it very hard for a member to be traced to their personal identity. Even when they don't want to be anonymous, or they think they don't need to be, or have a pathological urge to make themselves personally identifiable (again, because 'mental illness'). If you're not interested in protecting your identity, by golly the mod team will do it for you, including being banned in extreme cases where a member just can't get it through their head that you may not broadcast your identity, for any reason, whatsoever. We've done it on more than one occasion, we ain't playing when it comes to user privacy.

So, don't worry about what the settings say, there are restrictions in place that supersede them, and no other members are going to see your email. Only moderators, and we have no reason to pay attention to an individual's email address unless a trouble child gives us a reason to.

You will from time to time perhaps, depending on how you've set the User Control Panel, get automated messages via your registration email, but again, as a rule you won't hear from the moderator team except via Private Message. We have an excellent PM system and we prefer members use that, rather than share their email addresses, even if they did follow the rule mandating an unique email address. We want members here to have layers of privacy, like an onion.