Quote:
Originally Posted by honestdave 
and to what ben said, our database is no longer phpbb. it encrypted by vbulletin now and much more secure. we have no technical ability to break the encryption of the pm system.
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Hate to be picky here, but vbulletin runs on MySQL, and so even if you don't install the PHP hack that allows you to read PMs through the VB front-end, you could still conceivably just run the MySQL query client and pull PMs directly from the DB. From what I can tell in the VB docs the only stuff that's actually ENCRYPTED (ie: stored in a non-plaintext fashion in the database itself) is the passwords.
In fact, all the private messages are stored in a table called (big surprise) privatemessage and I've found lots of examples online of people directly querying that table looking for messages containing certain substrings, eg
SELECT message FROM privatemessage WHERE message LIKE '%phrase%';
Again, not accusing anyone of anything, but anyone with rudamentary SQL knowledge and direct access to the backing data store of HF could definitely read the PMs if they were so inclined...