I think it may be because of one of the forum settings. We get a lot of spammers who just love to get personal information of any kind so they can slam you with various things. Up to and including spoofing your email address while they are trying to register themselves in an attempt to thwart an instaban and sneak in.
Recently, we prevented almost 1100 registration attempts in just a few weeks for spammers trying to register here from various entities in a coordinated attack from every continent on earth.
That's why having personal information in the open forum is against rule #6. If you would like to provide someone with any part of your personal info, doing it in PM is a somewhat safer alternative. And giving out someone elses personal info is prohibited altogether. If the guy has a website, it's OK to give that address out as it's open content.
I'm pretty sure that new members with low post counts can send/receive PM's. Just that certain other parts of the forums (like the marketplace) is not available until you reach higher post counts.
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