1283479 - Change order of threaded messages to newest message appears on top of the list

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, enhancement)

Description

[Urbain]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:47.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/47.0
Build ID: 20160604131506

Steps to reproduce:

When sorting threaded messages by date, the older (original) message of each thread is always on the top of the thread and then the others are organized as a tree (and hidden if the thread is reduced). One can see that there is a new (unread) message in the thread when the top message is underlined and has to deploy the thread to retrieve it, but it may be confusing.



Actual results:

In the list of threads, if they are reduced, the dates seem to be disordered, although they are sorted by decreasing date order. It's often confusing, especially for beginners. For example, my wife has renounced to organize her messages by threads for that reason. 


Expected results:

My suggestion : the possibility (configurable by user) to organize the tree in the reverse order, so that the newest message appears on top of the list and the others are organized as a tree in the anti-chronologic order.
In that way, if all threads are reduced, you see the last message of each thread, often an unread one. Its quicker, the dates of the treads look sorted in the list of treads and it's much less confusing for beginners.

Comment 1

[Anje]

Maybe a duplicate of bug 479969

Comment 2

[Antanas]

The best approach after my experience is as Gmail does -- sort a thread by date ascending but hide all messages except the newest one with ability to expand some or all of the previous emails. Only guess: it's simpler to implement than reverse messages sort order inside of the thread?