quote:
Originally posted by Steve F.
90% of my PMs are missing. What happened?
This could have happened for several reasons. The MOST LIKELY reason is this:
Members were asked to clean out their mailboxes. This could have resulted in members cleaning their 'Outboxes' as well as their 'Inboxes' which will remove messages that they sent to other users. Messages in your outbox to someone are still in their Inbox. It is a shared system. This is partly why the statement was made several times that the Private Messages on this forum were not to be treated as an Email System. We cannot store data for an indefinate amount of time, especially for a freely hosted forum. We ALSO cannot control when members will choose to delete content from their Inboxes and Outboxes. I do not want to issue a 'global purge' of old PM's but considering there are still over 1000 unread PM's in the system from members that either do not login here anymore or have not realized they have a PM waiting. This is a decent size of 'dead weight' on the system. At this point, it only slows down your forums, and anymore is no skin off my teeth.
The best thing to do with a PM you want to keep is copy it's contents to a new TEXT document in Notepad.exe (or a text editor of your liking) or better yet, print them out.
I don't have and never issued a 'limit' on the PM activity, which takes down resources from my mail servers, the web servers, etc. I only asked that members make sure and keep copies of things they considered important.
This original request to clean messages from mailboxes was posted in the first week of March. I had made several notations that I needed members to clean out PM boxes. This is most likely why you feel you are 'losing' PM's.