Did you know...that re Private Messages

Rob Keeble

Member
Messages
12,633
Location
GTA Ontario Canada
Some of you may not be aware that it is possible to save the information you might recieve from a member in a private message efficienty and onto your own computer.

There are some benefits to this I discovered that i wanted to share, especially if you are now using Windows 7

So here is what to do.

When you go to the private message box you can either select the whole lot or individually select the ones you want to keep by ticking the little box on the rhs.

Then go to the bottom of the page and you will see a box with the word delete in it and the word go.

Now normally you would hit go to delete them and clear space in your PM box.

However you can also click on the drop down and select download as text or othe formats.

If you do and then click go you can save these pms as a single file on your pc in a folder somewhere. I mark mine pms from familywoodworking.

Now with windows 7 they have finally improved he search and indexing capabilities such that when you look to search for something it will find it in these text files.

This way there is no need to make a mission out of keeping a tip or some other info you would like to store for future reference.

After you have downloaded them you click the drop down text back to delete and hit go again and the system will then delete the pms selected. If you really want to be particular you can take time to select the individual messages but given cheap storage space and the fact that either way you gonna only get one file i just do the whole bang lot.

You might have to do this again if you allowed your box to get past 50 Pms to get to the point of clearing them all but in this case i just simply add a 2 to the name of the system generated file when it downloads and that takes care of it.

The file name automatically has the date reference in its title so if you do want to search through a particular period you can open the actual text file with the messages in it.

Hope this helps you make great use out of the PM service.

Cheers
Rob
 
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