1874085 - Folder views continually revert to unwanted, misleading "threaded" view

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1725127

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[GoldenBugatti]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/115.0

Steps to reproduce:

1. Set numerous folders to "View > Sort By > Unthreaded".
2. Tried setting numerous folders to "View > Sort By > Unthreaded" and going to the little tiny widget to the right of the folder column header and select "Apply current view to folder" to current folder and others
3. Tried setting numerous folders to "View > Sort By > Unthreaded" and going to the little tiny widget to the right of the folder column header and select "Apply current view to folder and it's childred" to every account and to numerous other folders
4. Restart TB after every change
5. Repeat this tens of thousands of times over the course of several years, and dozens of consecutive versions of TB.

Actual results:

Every new window defaults to View > Sort By > Threaded, resulting in emails I need to see being hidden.

Expected results:

Either 1) selecting View > Sort By > Unthreaded should make the view unthreaded for that folder and remember the setting for more than just that one momentary display of the folder. Selecting View > Sort By > Unthreaded and doing "Apply current view to folder" or "Apply current view to folder and it's children" should make the view unthreaded and apply the unthreaded view to the selected folder, or to the selected folder and all its children, respectively, or 2) These features should be removed from the program. In general, a menu option should do what that menu option says, or otherwise, be removed so as not to mislead users into thinking it will do what it says.

In no case should a user have to repeatedly select "View > Sort By > Unthreaded" many tens of thousands of times over the years. Selecting it merely hundreds or thousands of times should be sufficient to indicate that the view should be unthreaded.

In my opinion, the destructive and misleading "threaded" view should be removed from Thunderbird entirely, however I understand some people may for reasons I don't understand prefer to have emails hidden from view if they happen to be in reply to other emails. But it definitely should not force us to tell it tens of thousands of times over the years that we don't want that.

Comment 1

[Francesco]

This has been widely discussed in support forums. Set pref mailnews.default_view_flags to 0 to disable the default threaded view.

Comment 2

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Thanks for reporting this.
Does it still reproduce when using a current version 115.11.0?
Does it still reproduce if you have disabled automatic compact in Settings?

Comment 3

[GoldenBugatti]

Well, it's been 5 months and I honestly lost track of it. Sometimes threaded view creeps back in, often it doesn't, I haven't been keeping track lately and I really don't have any more time to troubleshoot Thunderbird, so I guess if keep this bug open depends on more input from me you can close it.

Comment 4

[Hartmut Welpmann [:welpy-cw]]

(In reply to GoldenBugatti from comment #3)

Well, it's been 5 months and I honestly lost track of it. Sometimes threaded view creeps back in, often it doesn't [...]

There are some recent similar reports linked in bug 1725127. Closing this.