PayPal protects you to a certain extent. It depends a little on the value of the item and where you are covered under their protection policy, you will need to find this out before entering into the transaction. For low value items, PayPal is a decent method to use, for more highly valued items, consider using something a little more secure.
Now that you have 10 posts, you should be able to use the Private Messaging feature, it is disabled for those with under 10 forum posts.
Hope this helps.