Hello Joe!
I've built another package, called contact-list, which does what you describe.
You can send messages to other users, search for other users, add them to your contact list, send bulk messages to your contacts, attach tags and notes to your contacts, monitor the visitors of your user profile and delete messages, as well.
When adding contacts or sending messages, email notifications are sent out, but not via the notifications package.
The problem is, the code is half-based on XOTcl and the other half is older code, which I haven't rewritten, yet.
If you're interested, I can send you the code as a starting point, but it's full of deprecated code, which I will be cleaning up, when I have time.
