Hi, sometimes I have private conversations, symbolised by the little envelope symbol. I often need to find these again for reference, but I can’t seem to find where they “live” - I am an admin which might be confusing the issue.
I have looked in as many places I can think, but the only way I seem to find them is by finding a post from the person in question and clicking from their avatar…
Have you tried your Profile Messages buttons?
where are those? I cant see them
You don’t see them near the bottom of the left column?
These?
On my site at discuss.phplist.org I have loads of non message stuff in there, including loads of “welcome to discourse” things which are not messages at all.
Yes, those are the ones.
If you have a lot of them you might have better luck using Search with the “messages” checkbox selected
It’s odd though, I have only a few messages, like 5 or six, but it says hundereds and all those “welcome to phpList Discuss” things are not messages, I don’t know what they are…
If you are the Admin, Discourse is sending Welcome messages to new members on your behalf.
Take a look at one.
Ah right, sorry, I thought that was just the intro page thing that there is, didn’t realise it was a message. Anyway to filter those out? Bit annoying really! 
AFAIK the Search doesn’t filter out but filters in, if you get my meaning.
That is you can’t exclude “welcome” but you can include “member_name” or a search term.
Well lets make a feature request for admins to have a way to not see these, perhaps a specific inbox or a check box filter etc. It’s unnecessary clutter.
That’s on the wishlist for future features!
No need to alter the history of your topic. Trying to rewrite history just makes a mess 
Your initial query was solved. The natural next step would be to start a new topic or find an existing one, like this one:
