Why do I need to put tags on my private mesages on here?

I have never received a message at Mylot, apart from the admin messages, so I have not encountered this. I can understand the tagging system because if a member has a lot of messages they can group them into categories by tags and make them easier to retrace, just like creating folders in Outlook to store certain message subjects. This can be a useful feature,but the part that I do not understand is the lack of option to send without a tag.

I think, as Asylum pointed out, that they are using the same 'engine' for messages as they do for discussions, so the tag feature is probably built in because of it. MyLot assure us that they do NOT monitor our private messages (though I suspect that they would be able to if required by a court or the FBI). That would be exactly the same situation as applies to any mail provider, IM system or forum, whatever the privacy level. Read any TOS and you will see that they always reserve that right. Tags are useful, though. They allow you to catalogue things in a variety of ways. In six months time, when you find your messages building, you may be very glad of that!

you can always skip tage if you want..

I noticed that too. I don't know why they did that.. maybe it's a glitch of some sort? I don't mind, though. It's not hard to add tags. ^^