"Send email to another member" - Can this feature be disabled?

[Wolpo]

Hello,

I have SMF 2.0.17.

In my Admin controls I've activated "Allow viewable email addresses". As expected, members can show their mail address in their profile. When I click such a mail address in a member's profile, the "Send Email" form will appear. Can this function be disabled? Can it be programmed so that a click on the mail address will open the user's mail program, so that users can directly send mails from their address to the other user -- without having the forum's email system in between?

If anyone has any tip -- thank you!

[Arantor]

You want your forum *directly giving out people's email addresses to each other*? That's not a good thing to want to do.

[Wolpo]

The address can be visible to members only, and I have a very special anti-spam question whose answer only special people know. So, our little community consists of trusty folks :-) Besides, everyone can hide the address if desired. Some people even reveal their address in forum posts sometimes (with the "at" word).

The problem with the "Send email" form is that I, as an admin, sometimes get replies from privately mailed users that reply to the forum address instead of the actual sender's address. I don't want to see their private stuff nor do I want to remind them all the time to check the correct address :-)

[Arantor]

"Everyone can hide it if desired". Sure, or they could, you know, not have to go out of their way to prevent your site leaking their details without expressly having to check, you know? If someone chooses to give out their email that's one thing, but it's quite another for a site to just hand it out, private community or not.

If this is in the EU, it's probably illegal, in fact.

In the interim, turn off the permission fir users to send forum emails, use the PM system if they want to give each other email addresses, and set up your mail correctly so that it's actually a no-reply email.

[Wolpo]

Good point. OK, I reset it to "hidden" :-)

I have never activated "Send a forum email to members"; even when it's deactivated, the "Send email" form will appear.

The PM system has never been active either. I don't want my users to put any private texts into my forum database. I want to keep the system as clean as possible.