Help How to Clear Your Inbox and Archive Your Private Messages

How to Clear Your Inbox and Archive Your Private Messages

What will this do?

• This tutorial will show you how to save your current private messages to your computer, and clear your Inbox and Sent Messages.

Why do I want to do this?

• So you can receive private messages without worrying about whether your Inbox will get full, or whether you can afford to erase your older PMs to get more space.
• Don't worry about the size of the downloaded messages; the saved messages are a couple of megabytes at most.

Getting to Your Inbox

• Click 'Private Messages' to go to your inbox.

Downloading Your Private Messages

• Scroll to the bottom of the page to find the area outlined in red.
• Click either 'XML', 'CSV' or 'Text' to start the download. (Feel free to experiment with each format.)

Saving the Private Messages to Your Computer

• Something along the lines of this will appear.
• You want to select 'Save', not 'Open', if you are given the choice. Save it to an area in your computer that you'll remember, and won't delete.

Selecting PMs for Deletion

• Return to the top of the page to find this area. You can click it to select all PMs from the last month. You can select all PMs from last week or yesterday in the same way.

Observing That They're Selected

• Like so.

Deleting the Selected PMs

• Now we are down here, click to get a drop-down menu.
• Select 'Delete' to delete all the selected messages. (In this case, all the messages from last month.)
• This will remove messages, which we backed up earlier, so that you can receive more PMs without your box getting crowded.
• This method means you can delete older PMs as you go. If you want to clear all of them, then the next method is for you.

Deleting All PMs

• Go to the bottom of the page.
• Click this to clear the entire folder of all PMs.
• Doing so will give you a completely cleared inbox. The downside to this is that if you have an old PM that you need quickly, you will be required to look through your downloaded messages to find it.

Confirming Deletion

• This screen will appear.
• Click 'Yes' in order to clear all the PMs in the Inbox.

Doing the Same to the Sent Items Folder

• You also have a Sent Items folder, as can be seen here, by scrolling back to the top of the page.
• Messages also get saved in the Sent Items folder whenever you send a message.
• Click on the Sent Items folder to navigate to it, then repeat tutorial for it.

You now have a clear PM box! You can now receive messages from people without worrying about whether your inbox will get filled up, because you can back up and clear it in less than five minutes.

 

P, I effin love you. This is definitely going to help me out. I don't PM much, but I do have PMs I like to save and I always lose them when I clear my inbox.

 

With the discussion of AutoPM floating around, this should be useful so no one is forced to delete stuff they wanna keep, or just plain get rid of old PMs they don't need.

But just how large of a file is the average PM?
And how large would the file be if the PM stretched, let's say, all the way down the page and such?

Just to make sure I don't waste any space on the computer. :/

 

I regularly do this, because I like keeping copies of the PMs I get for future reference etc. For those of you worried about the space it takes, it takes hardly any, definitely not enough to make you worry. Nice work P o;

 

Bumping this up to coincide with the recent reposting of the AutoPM poll.