Real-world applications such as magnetic resonance imaging with multiple coils, multi-user communication, and diffuse optical tomography often assume a linear model where several sparse signals sharing common sparse supports are acquired by several measurement matrices and then contaminated by noise. Multi-measurement vector (MMV) problems consider the estimation or reconstruction of such signals. In different applications, the estimation error that we want to minimize could be the mean squared error or other metrics such as the mean absolute error and the support set error. Seeing that minimizing different error metrics is useful in MMV problems, we study information-theoretic performance limits for MMV signal estimation with arbitrary additive error metrics. We also propose a message passing algorithmic framework that achieves the optimal performance, and rigorously prove the optimality of our algorithm for a special case. We further conjecture the optimality of our algorithm for some general cases, and back it up through numerical examples. As an application of our MMV algorithm, we propose a novel setup for active user detection in multi-user communication and demonstrate the promise of our proposed setup.