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The two options when setting the PM facility up on vBulletin are either show people's email addresses, or hide people's email addresses. For some smaller private boards, it likely makes sense to show the email addresses directly. But for a larger public board like this, keeping all email addresses private allows members to communicate without having to share their email addresses. Of course people can PM eachother their addresses and go to town, but that's not built-in.
Craigslist and some other sites create anonymous addresses for people to reply to, but once someone does reply back to them, they (the responders) are required to show their real email address, so it doesn't stay private for long. vBulletin doesn't have an equivalent feature, and the whole raison-d'etre of a forum site is to get users to keep coming back to that forum site anyway. Developing features that would allow users to completely bypass the website in the first place probably isn't at the top of their development timetable.
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