A personal message is sent directly to a specific person, while a personal message is sent and is intended to be private.
I assume this is a typo and you wanted to say that "
a private message is sent and is intended to be private."
They are both sent to a specific person unless you include additional users. They are both a private means of communication up to the point that someone makes them public.
There is no expectation of privacy for a personal message. It would be similar to tagging a particular person in a message. The forum will not proactively disclose the message, but either party could potentially disclose the content.
A private message on the other hand has the expectation of privacy.
An expectation is just you believing that something will or will not happen. You expect and believe that a privately/personally sent message is supposed to stay private. They don't have to. They are private and personnel until someone makes them public.
Private or personnel message is just a name for the forum messaging feature. I would agree with you if the forum had both private and personnel messages. In that case, we would need a way to distinguish those two.
What if the on-forum messages were called
Bitcointalk forum messages without mentioning the terms
private or
personnel? How are we supposed to look at them then?
Yes, that was a typo -- I fixed it.
Perhaps I should have written that there is no *reasonable* expectation of privacy for a
personal message.
The current implementation of the PM system makes this clear. For example, it is trivial to Blind Carbon Copy a third party any PMs that you send, including when you include a quote of a PM you previously received.
I would say, in general if you need to use some kind of encryption key (such as your GPG key) to read a message, there is an expectation the message will stay private. If the message can be read without using any kind of encryption key, there is no (reasonable) expectation of privacy. Exceptions to the above would be if the parties agree ahead of time.
When you encrypt (or decrypt) a message with GPG, you know exactly who can read a particular message.
