We have been investigating ways to migrate old private messages from vBulletin to esoTalk. This is possible, but unfortunately not user-friendly. To make a long story short, private messages that are transferred from vBulletin would show up as 1 thread per individual message in esoTalk.
For example, it would appear in esoTalk as User A starting a new thread to send a private message to User B. User B’s reply to User A would then be a completely separate thread. We fear that this could severely clutter the portal view for our users, and as such, we have decided not to migrate these old messages.
However, there is still a way to get your old private messages back if you would like. We have the ability to export messages from vBulletin into a .csv, .xml or .txt file. If you want to recover your old messages, just comment on this thread which format you would like, and we will send them to the e-mail associated with your forum account.
We are committed to providing our forum community with the best possible experience, and as always, appreciate your understanding.
I used to save these off every few months, here is the essence of what you will see for a single message in each format.
CSV
Date,Folder,Title,From,To,Message
"2012-11-09 10:15","Sent Items","Re: A bit of a dilema","jpearman","Jij","
Message removed for clarity"
TXT
VEX Forum;https://vexforum.com/
Private Message Dump for User jpearman; 02-08-2015 10:14 PM -->
################################################################################
Folder : Sent Items
################################################################################
================================================================================
From : jpearman
To : Jij
Date : 2012-11-09 10:15
Title : Re: A bit of a dilema
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Message removed for clarity
XML
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!-- VEX Forum;https://vexforum.com/ -->
<!-- Private Message Dump for User jpearman; 02-08-2015 10:14 PM -->
<privatemessages>
<folder name="Sent Items">
<privatemessage>
<datestamp>2012-11-09 10:15</datestamp>
<title>Re: A bit of a dilema</title>
<fromuser>jpearman</fromuser>
<fromuserid>122137</fromuserid>
<touser>Jij</touser>
<message>
<![CDATA[
Message removed for clarity
]]>
</message>
</privatemessage>
more messages here.......
</folder>
</privatemessages>
TXT is most readable, XML has the most potential for importing if you want to move the data into another format.
@jpearman : James, thanks for the samples. I mashed your sample as three messages and I did a quick AWK script to pull stuff out the text one, it was pretty easy. I assumed the ----- and ==== delimiters between messages and headers. I think it will be easy to re-format into my mail format and dump them into a folder for later use.
Dillion, please send mine in .txt format. Thanks for taking time to do this.
Yes, === and ----, start and end of header. When I previously downloaded I would grab all three as it was easy to do. I should have anticipated this would be a problem and downloaded before the migration.