A personal message or private message, often shortened to PM, is like an e-mail sent from one Internet forum or bulletin board system user to another user on the same forum.

Personal messages are more anonymous than regular e-mail messages because the e-mail address and IP address of the sender and recipient are not made available, with the exception of administrators and sometimes moderators.

This feature is usually implemented on Internet forums and Internet Relay Chat. Internet forums frequently allow the use of BBCode in personal messages, and in some cases HTML.

A form of PM can be done by any server-side language, such as PHP, Perl, etc. to let the user write the message then submit it. By the code written in that server-side language, the message, with its body, subject, places a record in the database.

See also

• Instant messaging