Hi Alan,

There have been some discussions on this and workarounds in the forum, which you should be able to view https://totara.community/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=18965#p7197

It was a deliberate decision to opt for 'for the 'Email is private' text for users who haven't set "Allow everyone to see my email" in their profile.'

As noted in that thread, there are improvements to the capabilities system in Moodle 2, so we are hopeful of being able to remove that restriction. In the meantime there is a workaround detailed at that thread.

Andy