I see that my PM inbox is almost full: "Your PM box is 90% full".

Is there really a point limiting this to 500 messages (total in/out) on a huge site like Flyertalk where discussions, advice and networking is so important. I can't see a technical limitation on your MySQL servers with saved text messages.

My suggestion is that you raise the limit to at least 1000 PM's or just remove the limit. Or create a usergroup for users with a few years and 1000+ posts in the forum and let them have unlimited PM's.

Thanks! ^

You can download your PMs as csv and avoid overloading your PM mailbox

Yeah, but imagine if Google said the same thing about Gmail. It's only text FFS and it takes the admins 10 seconds to fix and total cost would be close to zero.

I'm a vBulletin administrator myself and PM limits are nothing to worry about compared to messing with loyal day-to-day users contributing to the Community.

IIRC, FT Premium get 5000 PMs allowance. You may consider FT Premium if you need more than 500 PMs.

OK. I found this old thread: http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/techn...-pm-limit.html

I've been at Flyertalk since 2005 and never heard of either InsideFlyer or FT Premium - you might wanna check your PR department

I signed up for FT Premium now! ^

FT Premium gets 2,500 PMs.

FT has 1.4MM PM's saved. vBulletin's PM system was never designed to handle this many records, and therefore can act up from time to time. The limit is not because of the load on our servers, but the architecture of how they're stored.

Whenever I try to download as CSV, XML, or TXT from my Inbox, it only downloads Sent Items. Help, I'm at 95%!

Is this anything that would be addressed by the newer version of vB?

I think you're doing it wrong. You shouldn't have a problem downloading all of your messages.

Not that I'm aware of.

I'm an IT Manager, computer programmer, web developer, etc. But that's a bit irrelevant since there's little to do wrong when the only thing involved is clicking a download link that purports to "Download all Private Messages as:". If you could give a scenario of what I might be doing wrong that would result in an uncorrupted CSV file that has only Sent Items instead of "all Private Messages", it would be a bit more believable.

Administering a PhpBB forum myself (and a number of other sites with various types of server side scripting software), I would guess there's a problem in the code (probably in the SQL query that retrieves the table to parse) somewhere that is making so that it doesn't retrieve what is intended.

(Could a non-technical person try to download all their PMs and see what happens and post the result?)

Update: Just tried again and it download a bunch of sent items plus a few Inbox items (32) which isn't nearly all of them.

btw, I took a close look at that CSV file and it cuts off mid-PM on the last PM. So it actually appears to not be a SQL issue but rather some other issue that is limiting length. It could even be some LAMP config files that got changed (rather than a source code issue).

We're looking into this, but it looks like we're able to consistantly download large inboxes quickly with Chrome, but not with Firefox, which I can't seem to figure out.

Anyway, I'd appreciate it if you could give it a shot using Google Chrome.

I've been using Chrome. Weird. Let me try IE and FF and Safari.

Updated to add:

• IE - download hangs at 0%
• FF - downloaded partial, only 125 (130 KB) of 491 PMs
• Safari - download partial, froze at 934 KB (when I try to open or view containing folder, it refuses to let me because it's not finished downloading), after I hit resume, it started over and went to 478 KB (421 PMs); each time I hit resume, it goes to a different length... there doesn't seem to be any pattern on how far it gets
• Opera - downloaded what Opera thought was partial (it's still spinning its wheels, doesn't think the download is done, in fact, it's locked up), it got to 658 KB on first try, and amazingly 491 PMs are there!

It seems there's some sort of problem in how Apache is passing those files or in how PHP is parsing. If the former, it shouldn't be too hard to find a fix. If the latter, it's probably either something in the PHP config (check max_execution_time and memory_limit) or the headers aren't being set right.