Well, my point is I looked at your YC profile, followed it to your website and found your email from there. You could pretty much do the same thing with me.
Not every site needs an 'inbox', soaking up server-side state and adding complexity ot the interface.
However, there are two similar facilities I'd like to see that might better satisfy the same need:
- A directed-edge 'requests contact' toggle. That is, rather than delivering (and queuing) arbitrary messages, allow the one message, 'user X wants you to contact them'. It would be up to user X to ensure contact info is in their public profile.
- A threaded 'private reply', in public conversations, that only the author of the parent comment can see. My main use for this would be to politely point out little things (typos, broken links, etc.) the author may want to correct during the 2-hour editing grace period. There's no need to clutter the main thread with these, especially if the correction is quickly applied.
If such 'private threaded replies' were abused in either content (insults/harassment) or volume (long private threads that should be shared with the community or taken to other channels), checks could be added. Perhaps the target could choose to make the comment public, or they could limited to N replies deep, etc.
Those that don't probably don't care to hear from you either way.