Disguised mail system, hiding the original mailaddress

the mail-address that the user used to register with, should stay top secret…
…. I know that admins can look up those mail-addresses. That’s ok.

“Top secret” from whom then?

I give some examples: people asking financial questions but want to stay anonymous. Or a dating website. Or a minor looking for help that needs following up.

WordPress does not display users’ email addresses publicly on their profiles. WordPress also does not display commenters’ email addresses publicly when someone leaves a comment on a post or page. Contact forms will not post any data publicly either.

If this is with respect to a 3rd-party plugin with public user profiles (eg dating plugin, social media plugin, forum plugin, Q&A plugin, etc)… that’s up to that plugin how it manages user privacy… and such plugins will typically have a toggle for users to choose what personal info they want to make public.

So I’m not entirely sure from whom the email address should be kept secret, especially when you’ve said it’s OK for admins to see the email address.

Hi George, the mail-addresses should be top-secret for one user to another, not for the admins.

The server can easily send an email to any registered user’s address when properly prompted by another user. The From: address by default will be “WordPress ([email protected])” unless you filter it to be otherwise. You wouldn’t want to filter this to be the user who initiated the message, so any replies would end up in your domain’s “wordpress” mailbox, assuming you have one set up. Meaning there’s no simple way to reply to the original sender.

You’d have to maintain some sort of correspondence log so WP could forward any replies to the original sender, then back again, as often as required, without either party knowing the other’s address . There would need to be a way for WP to periodically check that mailbox and forward messages as needed. Look at the source code of wp-mail.php for inspiration on how this could be accomplished.

Another option would be to keep all messaging within WP, the only emails would be a notification that there’s a message waiting for them at your site. Of course measures would need to be taken to ensure messages are only visible to the intended recipient. By its nature, with this scheme it’d be simpler to keep track of who is messaging whom. But your DB could fill up with personal messages if your service becomes popular. You could implement a garbage collection scheme where older messages get automatically deleted.