161073 - Column sort order indicators inverted

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 72463

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[Dave Evans]

The most useful sort order for mail is (I would guess, for most people): sort by
"Order Received" (ascending/descending, whatever).

But:

1. The message list pane can only display the messages' "Date" field.  The
"Date" of a message is often wildly inaccurate (it can be many years off whack,
especially for Spam) and is thus useless for sorting.

2. The "View->Sort By->Order Received" menu option is OK, but too hard to find.
 Plus, when it is chosen, since "Order Received" is not a visible column, the UI
is not updated to show the new sort order.  By which I mean that the messages
are correctly sorted, but the triangular icons displayed in the column headers
are not updated, they reflect the previously-selected sort order.

I propose that there should be a "Date Received" column which is showable and
sortable (in the way that "Date" is now).  I also propose that it should be the
default column, since I believe that is what most people would expect.

Alas I do not have the necessary skills and knowledge to make it so :-(

P.S. It seems that the triangular icons used to denote the current sort order
are  inverted: choose "Ascending" sort order, the column correctly does indeed
sort "ascending", but the icon shows a downwards-pointing (descending) triangle.

Comment 1

[Olav Vitters]

About 2:UI not updated is bug 121382.

Bug 123786 is about the UI for the Received time, but proposes an option to show
either received or sent time in the date column. Not sure if this bug should be
duped to that one.

Comment 2

[Pratik]

This is dup of 72463. Reopen if you disagree.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 72463 ***

Comment 3

[Dave Evans]

I agree with the dupe.

However the bug I outlined in my original "P.S." still stands (unless that is a
dupe also).  Hence subject changed accordingly, and reopened.

(Sorry I'm not very good at identifying dupes - anyone is welcome to send me
advice on how to make better use of Bugzilla, if they so wish :-)

Comment 4

[R.K.Aa.]

Your "P.S." is bug 93772, a MSIE weirdness introduced in Windows 2000.
(Before that I believe MS didn't use arrows on sorting columns)

Netscape / Mozilla have never pointed arrows that way, but instead indicate in
which end of a list you find the newest item. (UP=top - DOWN=bottom)
The Netscape/Mozilla approach is also the one you find in UNIX/Linux apps.

This is a dup of several bugs, but re-resolving as dup of bug 72463.
Please only file one bug per bug-report.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 72463 ***

Comment 5

[[e-mail] (gone - use [e-mail] instead)]

verified