How to best download and preserve PMs?
 

I am continually faced with the problem of making room in my PM box, where at best, I am always a few short of the limit. And yet I don't want to do mass deletions, because, believe it or not, each one of these means something to be. Now, with that, I know that a good editor would tell me that it was "time to shoot my babies," and a any Buddhist monk would concur on the grounds that I was obviously exhibiting attachment, while a Rinzai Zen teacher would be far more blunt than any hypothetical editor.

But be that as it may, I seem to have a soft-side for being a pack-rat.

So with that, I will confess that I haven't had a lot of success doing mass downloads of PMs in any of the available formats. Even if the download is restricted to just one page of PMs - which I can save and index by date range - the resulting mass is a mess, and very difficult to scan for any particular message.

Any suggestions regarding download formats, indexing or the like will be gratefully appreciated.

Mike

I would download them all as CSV, import them into a spreadsheet program like Excel, then sort and copy/paste them into their own worksheets based upon whatever criteria is important to you (by month, by sender, etc.).

If you have a lot of PMs, trying to download them all at once may not work, so you might have to do them in batches.