I've had some people ask about this, so here is the story of my being banned.
Well, as many of you know, TBG was perma-banned. Fourinone was interested in contacting TBG and wondered if banned people could still read PMs. So, an experiment was devised in which four would ban somebody who was on the chat at the time and send them a PM. If he got no response in three minutes or so, he would unban the banned member.
This, of course, required a volunteer. Being the brave and fearless person that I am ( ), I volunteered. I continued to post on the chat until the point came that it wasn't allowing me to submit a post. So, assuming that this was because I was banned, I went to click the User Control Panel button to see if I got a PM. Unfortunately, it said that I had to login to view my control panel, when I had just been logged in. So, I logged in, but was informed that I was banned "IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE!" After a few minutes, four unbanned me. So, the experiment proved that banned people cannot view PMs.
There is the rather unexciting story of my banning.