Member communication and notifications

My Joomla/CB website ( beasleygenealogy.net ) is intended to be a locus of active collaboration among people who find one another, get to know one another and communicate. This collaboration has never taken hold. I'm trying to build that with the introduction of Group Jive. However, I'm noticing that, while there are many ways to contact people, it isn't getting out. I have one fellow who is helping me figure this out by testing responses. I go to his profile in my identity as a standard user and I see four places to contact. (See attached screen clip). In the top menu is "Messages". Clicking on that you see "Send Private Message" and "Send email to User". On the tab line below the canvas is "Quick Message". Below that is a Comment section. I used all four of these and asked Bill to let me know what he gets. He got the direct email but nothing from the "Private Message", "Quick Message" or "Comment". I have uddeim installed and at one time had that on the profile. At one time there were duplicate and messy PM options. I read that you shouldn't run both the uddeim plugin and the CB/uddeim plugin. so I disabled that. Of course, there is to be communication in the GJ groups plus people need to know about Kunena communication as well. I need to have one clear and reliable PM method and to know that people can use. I need to establish that allowing notification is done by default to draw attention. I did a search of the forum for "notification" but that is all about the "Activity" which looks too complicated for me to deal with right now. How can I assure that notifications will occur reliably for building of relationships and collaboration?

CB Activity notifications feature doesn't do anything right now. Nothing currently logs any notifications as I have not added the system actions to CB Auto Actions to do so. You're welcome to create your own auto actions to log notification activity by prefixing the asset with notification.USER_ID (user_id being the recipient of the notification). You can turn off the notifications button within CB Activity > Parameters > General.

As for private messaging the only private messaging functionality available is through UddeIM.

Please also in the future break up your post into paragraphs as a giant wall of text isn't very easy to read.

I did read that the notification is not functioning in the Actions component. That doesn't matter to me because I'm not interested in moving that direction right now.

From what you say, can I gather that the Private message at the "Messages" tab at the top and the "Quick message" must be a duplicate of the same thing? I see the defaults for PM in the uddeim component. Is that where to handle all aspects of IM including notification?

Quick Message is just a means to quickly message the user. It too uses UddeIM. The link on the menu just directly goes to UddeIM. You don't have to use Quick Message tab if you don't want it (unpublish it within CB > Tab Management). There are no other means of private messaging beyond UddeIM.