Friends lists on OOC bulletin boards

[AmateurHistorian]

Maybe this is off-topic for this forum, but I couldn't find another one that seemed more appropriate. I've used other bulletin board systems similar to phpBB that have a very convenient feature -- friends lists. They're just what they sound like: a list of people with whom you regularly converse, that lets you send the same message to multiple friends, and gives statistics on how many messages you've sent and received from each person, how many messages from/to each user are currently in the various mailboxes, the last time that person signed in to the BB, etc. Friends can be added to the list either by entering their user name manually, or from the list of all user names, or with a button at the bottom of every post.

Is a similar feature available in phpBB? Could we enable it on these boards?