PM archival question

Having reached the "full" point on my PMs, I'm trying to archive
them offsite before deleting. It appears that the only archive
mechanism is for the site to batch up an HTML or CSV file and mail
it to me. I'll spare you the gory details of all the special-casing
I had to do to allow that to get through my mailserver, but even
after doing that it seems like the "archive messages" function only
allows 50 at a time to be batched. In the process of trying to work
through that, 50 at a time, I just noticed that those 50 are RANDOMLY
CHOSEN and OUT OF ORDER, thus eliminating my ability to just recover
the archive and then mark a convenient range of held PMs for deletion
and then let the system delete them. With this, I'd have to carefully
pick and choose which messages I'd successfully received via email
and then just delete *those*, which seems way more work than it's
worth.
.
Is there a means of simply dumping all of one's PMs as straight HTML
output viewable ON the site, like most other forum systems do? Then
the user can simply download that as HTML or text and save it off
however they want. Going through the overhead of batching it up for
emailing to [possibly broken] recipient addresses is klunky at best,
and now coupled with a nondeterministic selection process [with no
option for "just give me everything"] is a true pain in the tuchus.
.
Advice welcome. I really am trying to clean up, but it's not making
it an easy process.
.
_H*

 

Okay, I think I have a partial solution. I wanted to archive the
"sent items" folder, which when mailed to myself originally contained
a random, out-of-order selection of what was in there [since I could
only pick 50 msgs at a time].
.
What seems to straighten things out is to create a new folder, and
then select and move all the messages in the original folder over
to the new one. Then archive. That seems to linearize it in the
database, so "first 50" becomes meaningful.
.
_H*