Auto prune users' personal messages

[6Dasher]

Is there any way to clean up users' PM inboxes to remove messages older than X number of days? I'm tired of hearing people say that Mr X's mailbox is full and to contact them somehow, or mailing the mods/admins how to proceed. I looked through the mods but could only find a similar feature for old posts, not old PMs.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Kindred]

In short... no

[6Dasher]

Is there a reason for that? I also don't see any mods, I can't be the only one to look for this functionality

[Illori]

why dont you just remove the limit if many are hitting it? i know i would not want to have to prune my PMs on a regular basis i might remove something important. i would leave a forum quickly if the forum auto pruned my PMs.

[Johnny54]

They are personal messages so you have no right to delete anything. Only the owner of the messages.
Look at it this way, how would you react when your email provider would delete part of your emails. Ik guess you would be furious.

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Doesn't sound like a good idea to me, I surely wouldn't like my PMs vanishing at random.

[aegersz]

no way ... ask people to prune via PM or post/thread but NEVER delete people's stuff unless it is absolutely necessary.

i monitor everything that happens on my site and only ever intervene if others/all are compromised. i might miss something but i am only human.

i hate stepping in, HATE it.

people HATE it when you mess with them, as i did when i started interacting on forums.

[6Dasher]

They are PMs on a foeum, not private pop3 accounts. If they have 500 PMs and can not be bothered to clean up their inbox so they become a problem, I have no issue deleting old PMs. People are lazy and can't be bothered in most cases.

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Just a note, traditionally in here Private Messages have been considered private, and as such the team doesn't like to give instructions that deal with PMs.
Each user has the option to prune their old messages though, that is an option available for users through their inbox.

[Steve]

As Lex said, no help is going to be given here on doing what you want to do.

If your people are holding on to 500 private messages then maybe you need to rethink the limits for your membergroups.

On that note, to prevent a "debate" on whether or not it's ethical to do such a thing, I'm locking this.