The wonderful @supakaity@lemmy.blahaj.zone has developed a script to help deal with DM spam.

With this script, when a user is permabanned, DMs sent from the account in the previous 24 hours will automatically be marked as deleted.

We have set the time to 24 hours to ensure that the majority of pre-existing (non spam) DMs are preserved in the event of an account being banned. That being said, if you lose a DM to this script that you need recovered, please reach out to myself or Kaity, and we can restore it manually for you!