231492 - Sort by thread vs sort by order received in View>Sort by

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[Greg Colyer]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113

Sorting by thread now seems to be mixed up with Sort by order received of the
menu under View>Sort by. Follow the steps to see at least part of the problem.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Open a mail folder (IMAP for me)
2. Sort by Order Received, if necessary
3. Click on the Thread icon to sort by Thread
4. Look at View>Sort by: still shows Order Received
5. Choose (say) View>Sort by>Date (this bit is OK)
6. Now choose View>Sort by>Order Received again: goes back to Threaded

Actual Results:  
Incorrect order shown at steps 4 and 6.

Expected Results:  
View>Sort by should correspond to sorting chosen by this menu or by icons.

Did not happen in 1.6a; don't know about 1.6b. Could be related to bug 199217?

Comment 1

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

I'm not sure what you mean in step 5 by "this bit is OK" -- when you choose 
View|Sort By|Date while the display is threaded, the threads are sorted by the 
most recent message in the thread.  (This behavior is kind of new, starting with 
1.5 -- prior to that, 'sort by thread' was always Order Received in actuality, 
if not shown so in the UI.)

I'm less sure what you mean in step 6 by "goes back to Threaded" -- What goes 
back to Threaded?  The display should have been threaded after step 5, and the 
menu shows Order Received checked.

'Thread' is never marked selected in the menu.  Threading is a display mode that 
is somewhat different from sorting; whenever the messages are threaded, they are 
still 'sorted' by some criterion or other -- which happens to be set to 'order 
received' if you select Sort By|Thread.

Note that there is also a menu item  View|Messages|Threaded  which is checked or 
unchecked according to the display mode.

See bug 219620.  The specifics change you note may be related to the change in 
bug 219787 (which did go in between 1.6a and 1.6b); however, my recollection is 
that the SortBy|Thread item stopped getting checked in 1.5 Final, as a result of 
bug 72493's fix.

I recommend this bug be marked WontFix or Invalid.

Comment 2

[Greg Colyer]

What you seem to be saying is that Threaded is no longer a sort option
but orthogonal to it. I have read the other bugs and they seem to cover
all the points; however, I'm still so confused by the present interface
that I'm dubious that they're fixed. Maybe time will cure me. :-)

The existence of "Thread" in the View>Sort by menu and the absence of
"Threaded" in the same menu is certainly confusing, especially given the
interaction between the thread and other icons above the message list.
If threading and sorting are orthogoal, then why does clicking the Date
column turn threading off instead of sorting the threads by date?
Clicking the Date column is now not the same as selecting View>Sort
by>Date or Ascending/Descending; clicking the thread icon is not the
same as View>Messages>Threaded because you can't turn threaded off with
it. (Clicking the thread icon will now turn Date Ascending into Date
Descending, which seems very bizarre. And it's not at all clear to me 
what View>Sort by>Thread now does. It seems to turn Threaded on, but it 
does not become ticked, so it is like just a part of the functionality 
already provided by View>Messages>Threaded.)

The worst problem for me is that Order by received has no column icon 
and so has to be operated through the confusing menus. Unthreaded, Order 
by received, is my most common view (especially for Inbox) and I surely 
can't be the only person for whom this is true. To reach it from threaded I 
definitely have to either choose View>Messages>Threaded or click a spurious
column header (like Date); then I have to do View>Sort by>Order received as
well, unless I did View>Messages>Threaded AND the sort order was already Order
by received. Previously I just had to do View>Sort by>Order received. So this
seems like a big change even though if you understand all the logic it may not be.

Comment 3

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

> What you seem to be saying is that Threaded is no longer a sort option
> but orthogonal to it.

Prior to 1.5, if you chose Sort By Thread, you got Threaded messages with the 
Threads in Order Received; you couldn't have a threaded view with the threads in 
Date or Subject order.  In 1.5, this was changed to allow sorting of threads; 
this resulted in Order Received being more visible only because it could now be 
deselected in a threaded view.  However, selecting Sort By Thread continued to 
mark the 'Thread' item in the Sort By menu.  But there were some minor display 
bugs, and fixing them (in 1.6) resulted in Sort By Thread displaying explicitly 
the true sort order, Order Received.


> If threading and sorting are orthogoal, then why does clicking the Date
> column turn threading off instead of sorting the threads by date?

Good question, and the basis of bug 219787.  This behavior has been in Mozilla 
forever, it's not new.  If you change the setting of the preference
  mailnews.thread_pane_column_unthreads  
to False, this behavior stops.  Instead, clicking the Thread column toggles 
between threaded and unthreaded, and clicking any other column sorts on that 
column, or reverses the sort if already chosen.


> The worst problem for me is that Order by received has no column icon

In fact, it does; it's just not shown by default.  At the far right of the 
column headers is an additional little 'header' -- click that to get a dropdown 
list of all the column headers, which you can pick and choose.  (Note, also, 
that columns can be dragged to different positions, as well as resized.)

Comment 4

[Greg Colyer]

I think you and bug 219787 have explained everything to my satisfaction. Thanks
also for pointing out the Order Received column, which I am now using (and have
set to minimal width, as I'm not interested in the sequence numbers).

My only remaining request is for View>Sort by>Thread to be removed, but that's
where bug 219620 is already going.

Comment 5

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

OK, marking bug as invalid.

Comment 6

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** Bug 237642 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***