Backing Up Private Messages from a vBulletin powered forum

Big Dan

EQ Forum Moderator
If you own or spend a lot of time on a forum chances are you will end up with lots of private messages. After a while with hundreds of messages things just get too clogged up not to mention the owner may of set a relatively small message limit which once filled you will no longer be able to receive private messages. What you can do in this situation, on vBulletin powered forums is download a copy then delete the messages on the board to clean your PM box. :)

First thing you will want to do is open your PM box.

On the bottom under display options click Text under "Download All Private Messages As" this will prompt a file download.

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Now you have raw output file that you can open in your text editor and do a searches with in.

You can also download and as CSV and import into Excel or Open Office Calc doing it this way is much easier to read.

Screen shot 2009-09-25 at 3.29.26 PM.jpg

To do this simply download the file as a CSV (comma separated values) instead of text then open it in your favorite spreadsheet program, it should automatically convert.
 
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