Looks like all the PM's everyone had, going back to 2004 or so, have returned to their inbox when we did the import... I have something like 60 pages or so....

If the pm's existed between either user (in either ones inbox) they will be restored, it was an all or none thing

All the deleted ones were also restored going back years...

OK I understand, if the reciepient had not deleted them they would show up again???

Yes, if the message existed in EITHER users inbox, it would be restored for both users; it was an all or nothing thing for the importer.

Where is the command now to delete all PM over 30 or 60 (etc) day

or is this even possible???

Hoping someone can say yes it is possible or NOPE not goin' happen.

I know we used to be able to do that, and I can not find anything in the manual about that..


I have had to put a limit of 3,000 pm's so people can still PM each other.

Right now this was taken out in favor of just a limit of private topics s that a user can participate in. I'd like to get this feature back in for 7.1 possibly, but only if I can also put in something so a user can download their private topics as well.

I'm still a fan of "Email a log of this topic to yourself" hehe

It seems to me that the only way to do it is to ask each forum member to delete all PMs older than XX days.

I was thinking it would be easy at first, but mysql doesn't support what i was contemplating so it'd be more trouble than it'd be worth lol...

I was thinking after my first go failed (miserably) that you'd have to have a script that reads the pm's data and if it's older than a certain date it's purged; it could be made quite fast if all you take form the db is the id and the date (the date meerely to compare against, the date so you're deleting the right thing) then have an if/else statement to say "hey this is older than the date we have here, i'mma delete it"...

Not sure where all the differant portions of a pm linger, so i'd have to give it another looksie (keep in mind i'm from the .c family, so this is my first time really digging at a .t database).

You could set the pm limit to 50 and tell them all that they need to clean their boxes ...

That's a good idea, setting it to 50 or whatever and asking them to delete the excess.

Then they have the choice to choose which they want to keep ...