Managing message limit of 100

[HMG]

I like to maintain an "archive" of private message (inbox and outbox) for future reference. As a result, I continually bump up against the 100 message limit.

If I download as csv, I lose a lot of the message content (just get the first line). I get it all when downloading as xml or text, but not very friendly formatting. Archiving the messages doesn't bypass the 100 message limit.

Suggestions to manage this? I already have "send email" enabled in my profile, but that doesn't help when others only receive (and reply to) PMs.

(And this is not intended to be a discussion of the pros and cons of the 100 message limit.)

[rdenney]

I just tested it, and with the CSV format I get the full message. There are no line breaks in the message, so in Notepad, it doesn't wrap and the message really stretches out horizontally. If you are looking at it in Notepad, try turning on Word Wrap.

If you open it in Excel, which is the default choice for the CSV type, you'll run into the character limit for text in a cell. That may be what you are seeing.

Rick "Ralph or Tom may have more to add" Denney

[Tin Can]

I dump mine at about 75%. What I wonder is, do they really disappear or are they actually stored somewhere?

Obviously 'somewhere' is inaccessible to us, but might be visible to someone.

No real privacy anywhere these days. Not a complaint, but an observation. We have always had lurkers in the woods.

Would the Internet Archive scrape PMs up somehow?

Of course we will never know if 'higher power's' are doing it.

[HMG]

In the excel file, I get the entire message (at least I think it's entire) when I change cells to "wrap text". A bit awkward formatting, but usable.

Randy, do you dump yours to excel or some other way? Or do you simply dump (as in delete); never to be seen again except by the NSA?

[StoneNYC]

Unfortunately this is my biggest issue with this forum.

I've been sent some amazing information before, and have been forced to delete it.

This often happens when I'm selling something because I get an influx of messages.

I've asked the mods if they would consider increasing it even slightly, I mean most messaging systems are in the gigabytes of storage, and I don't expect that much, but 250 or 500 messages stored would be a lot more reasonable for those who spend years on the forum and want to store useful messages.

But they have simply said I need to learn to manage messages better.

Just do your best to delete the unimportant ones, turn off your stored sent messages option, and delete unimportant messages immediate after you reply to them.

That's all I've been able to do.

[Tin Can]

In the excel file, I get the entire message (at least I think it's entire) when I change cells to "wrap text". A bit awkward formatting, but usable.

Randy, do you dump yours to excel or some other way? Or do you simply dump (as in delete); never to be seen again except by the NSA?

I delete 99% as it really is just unnecessary. If I do have a gem of advice, address or other important things I add the addresses to contacts and copy and paste any PM contents into a Word doc and save. However I don't use Word I use LibreOffice and donate to their efforts.

[jnantz]

what you need todo is save your messages as a PDF file or whatever format you want to save them.
or cut/past your message into a different program.
ir really isn't that hard.

[Tin Can]

what you need todo is save your messages as a PDF file or whatever format you want to save them.
or cut/past your message into a different program.
ir really isn't that hard.

Most of them do not need to be saved.

[jnantz]

Most of them do not need to be saved.

exactly ...

[rdenney]

Guys, it's easy to download emails, and you can then delete the ones you don't want to save. If you have emails that are special to you, remove them from the forum as soon as possible by downloading them. Like all online services, this one can be attacked and corrupted, and we make no assurance that we will be able to recover anything in the database of PMs.

Randy, when you delete PMs, they are not accessible. In fact, they are not accessible even before you delete them. We can apply some general processes, such as deleted all one's PMs, but we cannot see or read them. When you delete them, they are dumped from the database and the rotating backups will eventually lose them. The Internet Archive only preserves publicly visible sites, and links within those sites point to resources that may no longer exist.

This emphasizes the importance of backing up your important PMs--if we have to do something general to your PMs, we won't be able to discriminate between the important PMs and those that are causing the problem we are trying to fix. They will all get deleted.

Rick "a bigger inbox just makes you more vulnerable" Denney