Twitter DM wrangling, how do you do this? - small post for @digitalmaverick

With old Twitter you could easily scroll back for AGES to read your own tweets, @mentions or DMs. Although you can never scroll further back in time than 3,500 (them's the limits alas) you can sometimes find a random ancient tweet via one of the search tools - I think Topsy.com is the best. 

However DMs are not available to any tools other than apps that you sign into by authorising it to use your Twitter account. 

I've found with New Twitter (I don't yet have New New Twitter) that most of my DMs appear to have disappeared from view, but if someone sends me a new DM then I can see a very long conversation with them stretching back in time. It seems that you can see these tweets only when they are 'called up' in this way. 

Incidentally I also rate Chirpstory and Storify for a quick way of grabbing a bunch of hashtagged tweets (Chirpstory wins it for me, the interface isn't quite as lovely as Storify but you can grab tweets by the page rather than individually and you can reorder them so they appear chronologically).

@digitalmaverick is trying to read some of his older DMs and I love a Twitter archive challenge but this one is likely to thwart me as I don't really know what to suggest. digitalmaverick I have failed you ;)

Snapbird.org has already been suggested (I'm reading @digitalmaverick's timeline!) and I managed to find a DM I'd sent from 18 July 2011 which isn't bad at all. Of course you have to have a particular search word in mind rather than being able to be reminded of what you wrote. For example I like reading my old sent emails and being reminded of something that I'd forgotten (which evidently I'd not be able to search for).

So my suggestion is either to switch on email notifications of DMs (and set up an email filter to whisk them straight into a folder that you can safely ignore but search or browse later) or get all your friends to send you DMs in the hope of calling up earlier ones.

What tools are there that can help with DMs? Any expertise I have is limited to hashtags I'm afraid... meanwhile there are umpteen Twitter tools I've collected here so that's a good place to start looking.

• A list of tools for finding or capturing tweets (30 May 2011, updated 14 October 2011)

P.S. Also - the reason you can't spot your hashtagged tweet in a search might be answered by these Quora questions and answers.

• Why don't my tweets show in hashtag feeds? - and see related questions in the panel to the right.