It’s possible to send a PM to both friends and to others that you find on the net. When you send a message to a ‘friend’, FB tells you when it’s been seen. Does it do that for non-friends? I sent a contact message to a grand-nephew and can’t tell if he’s received it.
Non-friends often don’t see your messages at all. Sure, you can send them but the recipient can’t usually see them unless they check both their Hidden and Filtered messages folders which isn’t intuitive.
Here is how to check your own. I only remember to do it a couple of times a year and I almost always have some messages that were filtered out. I suppose that feature is meant to protect people from SPAM, stalkers etc. but it also does a great job of hiding legitimate messages.
In my experience, it is best just to send a real Friend request before you send a message. At least the recipient will get notified of those.
You will get a notification that “[so and so] Accepted Your Request”, where a “request” is sent ahead of the message, asking to allow your message to be sent.
I don’t know if you get a notification if/when the request is denied.
Thanks. That actually happened to me; discovered a message when I was clicking around. Seems odd that you wouldn’t receive notification for all messages, doesn’t it?
For a while they tried charging the sender $1 to guarantee delivery (and your notification), otherwise they would just algorithmically decide if your message was worth the recipient’s notice. That was an experiment; not sure if it’s still going on, and if so, for what % of the userbase.