Its a stupid question  but I can't figure it out

Go to Messages from the menu. 

It's just as Martin says:
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The messaging system needs to be rebooted/restarted. I've requested this from the LifeRay tech folks.

Thank you for the heads up, Jim.

The messaging system, or DMs, has been restarted.

Message away!

As far as I can tell there is no red dot or other type of on screen notification to let people know they have a message waiting, so I usually tell them in the thread that I have something private to say so they know to look for a message. 

I'm not sure if there is a way to get e-mail notification of pm's. But if there is you don't necessarily know if your pm recipient has it enabled.

You should receive an email notification that you have a message on the DhO system to read. And yes, it's good practice to let the other person know in a comment that you sent them a DM.

Chris,

Is this the e-mail setting that comes up when you click on your avatar in the top right and go to acount settings -> preferences -> general -> email?

I was getting a lot of unwanted email from the forum and I tried to disable it in the forum settings. I don't remember exactly what I did at the time - there might have been differences with different versions of the forum software.

​​​​​​​Is there a way to enable email for just private message notifications?

Thanks,

Jim, see below. This is all the configuring DhO on LifeRay can offer us. You have to carefully select various notifications after following this process:

Go to your icon at the top right and select the "Notifications" menu item. On the following notifications page mouse-over any area and a blue "Notifications" menu will appear under "Welcome" on the top left. Click on the three dots on the righthand side of that menu:




A scrollable page full of notification "switches" will appear that you can adjust to your liking:

Using the notification settings described above, you can adjust what email you receive as various things happen on the message boards and other parts of DhO. It's ridiculously complicated, like LifeRay in general, and it takes a few minutes to do, but you CAN customize how you are notified. So, for example, you can have email enabled overall but then go to this notification configuration menu and turn email notifications off (or on) for specific occurrences on the message board, like replies to any topic you are subscribed to. That way you will receive only PM/DM notifications and not all the others.

I hope this is somewhat helpful.

Where do I do that?

 I don't see anything on the notifications configuration window that references "Messages".

There is something for "Message Boards" but the choices don't look like they are for priavate messages.

Jim, you have to do this by process of elimination, enabling email from the DhO in general and then by eliminating email from the message boards or any other part of DhO. That will allow the PM/DM email notifications that you want, and block all the others that you don't.