Hi Thomas,
I'm glad you asked those questions as I'm sure a few other people have been thinking the same thing.
We've had a minor issue with the functionality of tracking messages and posts that users have sent out from their account. That view is avaialable under your profile as you had mentioned, but has not been keeping track of all messages properly. The site will be down for maintenance and upgrades from this evening at 10pm PST until Sunday Feb. 27 at 2pm PST. We will be addressing this issue, as well as the overall speed of the website.
Private messages are not yet available on the site, but stay tuned as we launch further releases of the website where PMs will be made available. If you have any other questions, be sure to post them here!