It is espacially strange with the welcome PM's. People get a PM with "welcome", they reply with thanks, and that reply is lost in space. No warning whatsoever.
No warning? If the user can read, here's the default welcome message:
Welcome to our forums! Please take a moment to review and update your profile and preferences to take full advantage of our features. You can do this by clicking on Edit Profile and "Edit Preferences" in the My Stuff dropdown. Please do not reply to this message as this is just an automated welcome message to thank you for joining our community.
So, it does give them a bit of a warning and tells them it's just an automated welcome message
The reason the welcome message is just the user and doesn't involve the admin as well, is fairly simple. Say you have a big site and you get 20 new users a day. You'd have to delete all of those welcome messages every day, day after day as they'd be in your PM box as well.
As far as sending one and not adding any other users. It's intended and will have a future use. As Gizmo said, it's useful for keeping notes or reminding yourself of something, which I do quite a bit. As for it's future use, that will be how PM drafts will work. You can save an unfinished PM as a draft, and then add other users to it later.
