PM Management System

[robd]

Have any of the programmer/computer enthusiast types out there written a PM management system that you'd be willing to share? Trying to manage and sort PMs via the vBull interface is a pain unless you keep on top of it all the time - key weakness for me is inability to list PMs in author order which then makes sorting into folder by author a real chore. I know I can dump them as text, csv or xml which makes searching for a specific old message simpler but still not as flexible as I would like. Before I spend time trying to knock together a system myself for dealing with the output from one of the dump options I just wanted to see if I could stand on the shoulder of a giant, so to speak.

Thanks

Robert

[ducasi]

I agree, PM management is "weak" in vBulletin.

Don't think anyone has done anything about it beyond move their old PMs out of vBulletin.

I plan to write a PM to mailbox convertor so I can manage old PMs through my email program. One of these days...

[DavidY]

When my mailbox got full (in a non-Silver period) I exported all the messages to XML then imported into an MS Access table. This gives you basic capabilities (like being able to sort on any field) with very little effort although you need MS Access, and it's not pretty.

[David Franklin]

I plan to write a PM to mailbox convertor so I can manage old PMs through my email program. One of these days...

Inspired by the idea, I've hacked together a proglet for converting PM's exported as CSV into .mbx files. But as it's for my own use but there's no error checking etc.

Annoyingly, for some reason there seems to be a bit of inconsistency in vBulletin's export code about whether the main message body is quoted or not. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, and if it isn't, it's not obvious to me how you know where the message field ends. In the end I've just checked to see if the next line starts with a number between 1995 and 2010 (i.e. part of a date, and so the start of the next record) - which works fine for my messages, but might not for anyone else. (And with no error checking, it will probably crash if it gets confused...)

Anyhow, the main reason for posting this is that having successfully imported my PMs into Thunderbird, I'm left feeling unconvinced it's particularly worth the candle. I'm not sure you gain terribly much. Maybe if I could be bothered to convert [quote],[b],[url] etc. into HTML codes it would be more inspiring...