My PM Inbox has lost many messages
 

Somehow, I cannot see my messages that are older than a day in my inbox. What is the problem.?

Anyone else have this problem? Is it very serious that I have to try and recover it?

My box is gone as well Gerald.
It shows the year 1969 as my last post!

Gerald, I would appreciate any effort to recover it.

Yep, PM problems.
 

All but 2 of mine are gone (15 set to 1969 and gone).

It's not important to me, just another data point.

Yup same problem here, most of my messages are set to 1969.:confused: Would be nice if they could be retrieved. If it is not too much effort. :eek:

Same here but it strangely shows the mailbox full of empty messages from 1969 as well.

What have you guys been doing? I don't know why but mine are fine.

The messages I received in Sep and Oct are fine but the earlier ones are gone.

mine says I have 2 but they can't be selected. Nothing there.

I have now made an attempt to repair the weird dates . . . . . has that made any difference to those seeing the 1969 date?

Sorry but...

Nope! Still broke.

Mine are also all gone.

Last one sent was 3 weeks ago everything older than that is gone with 1970

Sorry guys, I did not realise you used PM's to save valuable info. I always used it just for first contact and then reverted to my normal e-mail system. What happened here was that the table in the database that stores PM's was getting rather large, so I deleted 75% of the PM's from the early end, thinking that I was clearing out old clutter. 2 weeks ago I cleared 10% as a test. It appears that the "open slots" created 2 weeks ago have now taken up some of the later PM's and doing a second delete caused the current mess.

I didn't have problem with the relative large size of the server space that your PM's were occupying, per se. I just thought that this forum was not meant to be a mailing system to store stuff where normal e-mail should be used. Especially when we have people joining the forum making no posts but sending PM's like crazy. I get the impression that these phantom "members" are only here to spam via the PM system?

Anyway, I have asked my server host if he he can put PM's back to where they were on Sunday (restore from his backup) and let's see what he can do. But, in the longer term, I am either going to disable PM's, or try to restrict PM's to members who actually make some posts. Snag is, we have the spammers who occasionally make 5 inane posts and then disappear.

To summarize from my viewpoint: PM's were not the reason for starting this forum, and I am not going to let PM issues tie me up in running the forum. I am inclined towards removing the feature altogether. Therefore, please don't store valuable stuff in this forum's PM system.

You can also backup your pms to a text file as well. I have done this in the past to allow me to delete some older pms. Just select all the pms in the inbox or outbox and select download as text from the drop down box on the lower right hand side of the screen. :)

My server host has restored part of the database - could those with problems tell me if it is fixed?

Mine are back. Thanks! I also agree with the new policy of no guarantees in the future.

For the first time, I now had a corrupted inbox with a 1970 date - but a delete solved that! :D

Gerald,
Some of mine are back but only from the end of August to now.

I am afraid that this is as good as it is going to get.

Also only partial return of my pm's, but I'll back up those I need, and delete the rest...