Export PMs?

Notabot · Post by **Notabot** » Thu Aug 19, 2010 7:15 pm

Is there a way to just forward all my private messages to my real email? I've got a bunch in there that I don't want to go through one by one and copy to a file, but they'd be nice to keep handy in case I want to go back through them at some point. I'm not talking about an auto-forward, just carting my saved messages off to an account with more room.
Thanks!

Post by **Warcry** » Thu Aug 19, 2010 8:16 pm

At the bottom of your PM inbox (the screen that lists all your messages) there is a drop-down box that lets you choose different actions (move, delete, etc...). Three of the options are: Download as XML, Download as CSV and Download as TXT. I've never actually used it, though, so I'm not sure exactly what the output looks like.

It's not quite what you're looking for, but once you've got the files you'll be able to save them on your PC for reference or email them to yourself for storage.

Halfshell · Post by **Halfshell** » Fri Aug 20, 2010 3:19 pm

I know it won't make the blindest bit of diff to PMs already received, but enabling email notifications for the service means you'll actually get the body of any message sent to your email account anyway.

Notabot · Post by **Notabot** » Fri Aug 20, 2010 6:05 pm

Yeah, I've got those enabled, but I deleted all the old ones as they came in. Suppose I should just start keeping those.
As for the "Download As" buttons, I had never noticed those before. On using them, though, they are largely unreadable because of all the code and formatting that comes through as text. Any way I or the powers that be can fix that easily?

Rack 'n Ruin · Post by **Rack 'n Ruin** » Fri Aug 20, 2010 7:34 pm

Export PMs? It'd be nice, but I doubt anyone would take David "Dave" Cameron...

Post by **Denyer** » Fri Aug 20, 2010 9:13 pm

Notabot wrote:As for the "Download As" buttons, I had never noticed those before. On using them, though, they are largely unreadable because of all the code and formatting that comes through as text. Any way I or the powers that be can fix that easily?

Seems fine for me exporting as txt, just the usual BBcodes.

If you want to remove them, search and replace in Notepad should be okay for bold, italic, etc. or get a real text editor (eg, jEdit or NoteTab) and use regular expressions.

If you're confident the messages don't use square brackets for other purposes then \[(.*?)\] as a matching string should do fine, although I don't really understand why anyone would want to remove quote tags.