I am not really sure that I understand why, but according to theymos, after you have a certain number of PMs in your inbox, it will take longer to access your PMs. I have 515+ pages of messages in my inbox and it takes a noticeably longer amount of time to access my inbox, verses how long it takes me to access my inbox in accounts with ~20 pages of PMs.
It started being noticeably slow when I had 200 or so pages of messages in my inbox.
Right. When you load any PM page, it actually does some processing of
all of your PMs. The SQL query is really complicated, so I haven't been able to figure out how to optimize this. (After you load one page, it'll be fast for a while due to caching.)
Also see:
I actually have code written for exporting PMs into an mbox file compatible with Thunderbird, but I haven't gotten around yet to figuring out how best to present this functionality to users. (It's unusual because it takes a bit of time to generate and the resulting file should maybe be encrypted.)
If any established members have a strong need for it, I can manually create an export for you. For example, if you have so many PMs that the PM page is slow to load for you, you can get a PM export from me and then use the "purge PMs" feature. I'll probably only do this one time per person...
If for example, there was a reason, possibly due to a dispute that an old PM would be needed to be publicly verified, would there be a way to prove that the contents of a PM was what was actually received? Currently someone could allow access to their account (bad idea, but some people do this sometimes), or the PM can be reported to a moderator who can quote the contents of the PM.
Also, if you were to export the PMs for someone, would you be willing to do it again if they were to receive x00 additional pages of PMs subsequent to you doing this? Or, is this unlikely to happen prior to when the new forum comes out (and it will no longer be an issue)?
