1369780 - Make preference to sort threads by first message accessible in Appearance Settings

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, enhancement)

Description

[David E. Ross]

Attachment: Image of Thread pane with detached reply prior to thread.

Windows 7 Ultimate SP 1
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/52.1.1
View > Layout > Wide View
View > Sort by > (Date, Ascending, Threaded)
Protocols:  POP3 and SMTP

When messages are sorted by date-time, threaded messages appear in the Thread pane sorted according to the date-time of the last message in the thread.  This is a result of bug #20385.  

There should be an option to sort according to the date-time of the first message in the thread.  When a thread is broken (e.g., a newsgroup reply is received via a linked listserv or via GoogleGroups, an E-mail reply is received from an E-mail client that does not support threading), replies become sorted by date-time away from the rest of the thread.  This is seen in the attached image for the mozilla.support.thunderbird newsgroup.  

This bug report replaces bug #1369591.

Comment 1

[Alfred Peters [:infofrommozilla]]

As a workaround use sort by 'Order Received'.
This is still sorted by the first post.

But see also Bug 254159 & Bug 383985 ;-)

Comment 2

[Hartmut Welpmann [:welpy-cw]]

This should be customizable by the (albeit hidden) preference mailnews.sort_threads_by_root. Does this work for you, David?

Comment 4

[David E. Ross]

Yes, setting mailnews.sort_threads_by_root to "true" works. However, my 30+ yeas experience in software testing and engineering taught me that options for a capability are best when done through a user interface (a menu option in this case) than through a database item (a preference in this case). That is because some capabilities require changing more than a single database item (preference) in order to change an option.

I will leave to the development team whether a menu capability for this is to be done. If not, then close this bug report.