Thanks for reply I discovered by accident that if you type out the name such as "/tell hayleycolgan" once and just press enter you start a conversation with that person and no longer need to retype it again, every thing you then say is just with that person. To exit you just type "/tell" and that ends the conversation with that person.
You can also type "/ch t", which will end the conversation and return you to town chat, but it's the same number of characters, so it doesn't really make a difference.
Yeah, that's a great little feature Just have to be aware that when they log out if you send a message it will go straight to town chat. You can also type /ch t to get out of it, or /ch l if you want to go straight into local chat.