1826368 - Messages in cross-folder/synthetic views (unified folders/global search results) may be threaded incorrectly.

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[Crimson Egret]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.15; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/111.0

Steps to reproduce:

I am using unified folders, and view settings set to:

• view >> sort by >> date
• view >> sort by >> descending
• view >> sort by >> threaded

In unified folder (e.g. "inbox"), the settings behave properly. That is, the most recent threads are at the top, and the message thread is displayed in threaded order with the start of the thread at the top, and subsequent messages ordered by time, most recent at the bottom (ascending).

This also works in non-unified folders perfectly, as well as when using the "Quick Filter" feature to select a subset of messages (e.g. by "subject")

Actual results:

However, when viewing that same unified folder, using the quick filter pane, the view settings for threading are ignored. One can click (twice) on the "display messages threaded" button on the left side of the message summary pane to view messages in the correct order again, but that should not be necessary.

Attached in subsequent comments are screen grabs of the different views.

Expected results:

I believe that unified and non-unified folder views should behave identically, both while filtered and not filtered.

Comment 1

[Crimson Egret]

Attachment: unfiltered.png

Comment 2

[Crimson Egret]

Attachment: Filtered, but improperly threaded view

Comment 3

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Reporter,

If you have resolved your issue, please update the bug report describing what you did to resolve it.
Also, do you see the same issue when updating to version 115?

If your original problem happened when updating to version 102, then bug 1773822 is a possible cause, but I don't think we will ever know for sure. Bug 1777606 comment 13 has a workaround for that case.

(apologies if this sounds like generic message - it is)

Comment 4

[Phoenix]

Resolved per whiteboard

Comment 5

[Crimson Egret]

I'm not sure why this was marked "RESOLVED" - it is definitely not resolved. The same behavior I outlined 6 months ago still exists in 115.3.1.

Comment 6

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

(In reply to Crimson Egret from comment #5)

I'm not sure why this was marked "RESOLVED"

Because we sometimes rely on user feedback, and no one replied to comment 3?

Comment 7

[Crimson Egret]

Thanks for the explanation, and I know I hadn't yet gotten around to feedback - sorry about that.

On a technical front, the behavior does still exist in the latest TB, as I noted above. I can try to provide more details, but it would be helpful to know the parameters upon with the threading is based. Is it Message ID chains in the headers? Inferred by date and subject? Soemthing else?

Procedurally, marking the issue resolved with comment of "Resolved per whiteboard" doesn't help. If there is a process behind the scenes that is used to try to keep the issue boards from becoming stale, I get that. Perhaps a tweak to the process and a consistent text with a link to the documented process would help? Just brainstorming.

Comment 8

[Hartmut Welpmann [:welpy-cw]]

Confirming there are problems with correct threading in unified folders, see also these code comments.

Comment 10

[Hartmut Welpmann [:welpy-cw]]

Attachment: WIP: Bug 1826368 - Improve cross-folder view threading.