229220 - Moving to "next mail" upon mail deletion doesn't honour the chosen direction when sorting by date

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 19625

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[Rolf Sponsel]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; WinNT4.0; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007

Mozilla doesn't honour the currently chosen direction for sorting messages by
date when deleting a message from the Main Mail Pane. It *always* makes the
message *below* the deleted message the new "current" message.

This becomes really annoying when processing mails from, e.g. subscribed mailing
lists, where one preferes to read older mails before newer mails. Once that
older mail has been read and you decide to file it to another folder or delete
it, one in this case want's the mail that is above, i.e. the newer mail, to
become the one selected. This is not the case today. Today the mail below, i.e.
an older - possibly already read - mail gets selected and thus recuires you to
explicitly select the one above (maybe also mark that older mail as being
"unread" to restore it's original state). This becomes quite cumbersome,
particularly when processing more than just a few mails.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. In the Main Message Pane sort messages by date so that the oldes messages
appear before newer messages.
2. Select a message of choice.
3. Delete that message.
4. The new "current" message will be the message that was below the deleted one.
5. Now, reverse the sort order (by date)
6. Select a message of choice.
7. Delete that message.
8. Now, *again* the message below, i.e. the message that was older than the one
deleted, will become the new "current" message.

Actual Results:  
Please see "Steps to Reporduce".

Expected Results:  
It should have made the message above the one deleted, i.e. the message that is
younger than the message that was deleted, the new "current" message.


Behaviour observed in Mozilla 1.5

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Delete follows the same 'next' direction that Go|Next|(anything) does.

For what it's worth, I like having this behavior.  I periodically scan thru my 
Local Folders/Sent to delete stuff; I sort that directory youngest first, then 
start at the top and delete, or move, in sequence.  It would be annoying to *me* 
if movement was always in 'ascending' order, rather than top-to-bottom.

Perhaps what is needed is a preference for which side, top or bottom, 
corresponds to the 'ascending' top.

Comment 2

[Rolf Sponsel]

I certainly respect your habits and I certainly wouldn't want to make you to
have to abandon the way you work. I also appreciate your understanding for the
inconveniences the "static" way, this is implemented in today, constitutes to me.

A configurable preference, even via 'about:config', would be very appreciated by me.

(There is actually another inconvenience about automatically moving to another
message - in any direction - but that has to be filed separately some other time).

Comment 3

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 19625 ***