My b2evolution Version: 3.3.3

Hello all,
I am trying to set up a blog for collaboration on a project. Naturally none of the information there should be public, so I set up the blogs with advanced user permissions. Users can only post up to protected level, so nothing gets published by accident. This all works fine, but...

First thing I notice:
When I try to set up a subscription to posts and ocmments from the user menu in the top level menu bar, I get a dialog where I can check boxes to subscribe to entries and to comments for each blog I can see. When I close the window by clicking on "update", and then open it again, only the checkmarks for the public blog remain, the ones for the protected blog (of which I am a member and for which e-mail subscriptions is activated) disappear. However, looking into the database table evo_subscriptions, it appears that they are set nonetheless.

Second thing:
The subscription only works when I actually publish an entry, but that makes it visible to everyone. When I set an entry to "protected" and save it, no notification is being sent.
Is there any way to get a notification on protected posts as well?

Thanks a lot
Reiner