Saving PMs

[MTGuru]

Is there a nifty way to save off old PMs to disc? I'm cleaning out my message boxes, and saving messages individually as Windows mht files. Which works fine, but is a bit clumsy and labor-intensive. Any better tricks would be appreciated. Thanks, all!

[Wanderer]

why not copy and paste them into notepad or something similar?

[MTGuru]

Sure, that works, too. But mht is nice because the saved page preserves the layout and formatting with quotes and links intact, and behaves just like the original page. I can resave it to formatted text and use a Perl script to remove the extraneous stuff.

I guess I'm wondering if there's a phpBB trick or a script or application, server side or client side, that can spider through one's message box and pull off the messages without manually processing each one.

[Wanderer]

Ah, I see

In the olden days, when surfing the internet was slow, there were a lot of spidering programs out there. I dunno how many of them are around today....best of luck to ya!

[MTGuru]

Thanks, Wanderer! I wouldn't want to alarm the powers that be by crawling around the board, so I hope that Rich or one of the mods will jump in here ...

[rich]

I don't know of any way other than manually or automatically saving pages. (Pulling it out of the database wouldn't give you anything particularly useful, I don't think, and I don't like the idea of starting to do custom database requests )

If you're going to spider, please do it very slowly (say, one request per second max), and remember that you need to start at the private messages inbox page and only go one level below that to get PMs (and that your spider will need to use your browser cookies to appear "logged in").

[MTGuru]

Thanks, Rich. For now, manual save to mht actually works fine. I also wrote a Perl script to pull out the message headers into an index file. If I clean up the script, I might post it for others to use, too. And if I try spidering, I'll follow your guidelines. Much appreciated!