This morning I got an email from one of our members, about a problem user. A user has been sending some "threatening" PMs to the member that contacted us, but he deleted that last couple PMs before reading them bccause he was simply tired of reading the threats. But, he asked if I could read the messages that he had deleted, to ensure that the threats hadn't reached a serious level.

So, any way to do this?

Not that I am aware of, other than pulling out a backup and digging it up.

Yeah once they're deleted, they're permanently gone from the database.

If you have a recent backup like eric mentions, you can open the sql dump in a text file and look under the w3t_Messages table for 'em.

Yeah, I backed up the board at like 5am this morning...

why not just add another routine to your PM where if a user deleted their PM, instead of writing, R or W or whatever the current "Read/Replied/CC" commented are... it would write "D"... and if listing the PM - it would display all except the ones with "D"....

Admins could read EVERYONE's PM with a command such as...
SELECT *
FROM `ubb_Messages`
WHERE `M_Uid` = ###
ORDER BY `M_Sent` DESC

But regular members would only see the message without "D" in the status column...

If you set your MESSAGE PURGE to XX days, then all PM (including those with "D" status) would be purged at XX days.

Its just a matter of editing the DELETE command in the php file to update a column, rather than to mark it for deletion,... and then for the listing commands to list only messages for user NOT CONTAINING "D".

I hope this helps!

OK, sorry.. I read your initial post as something that you wanted to do in the FUTURE.... not as something that you wanted to bring back/read from the past

never mind my comments then.... Unless you want wanted to know how to do it in the future