259726 - need "sort all folders like this one" option

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 175502

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[[e-mail]]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10
Build Identifier: Thunderbird version 0.8 (20040913)

I have many folders in my imap account.  What I want is to sort all of my
folders the same way, which is NOT the default thunderbird way.  Personally, I
want to sort by Date, with the newest one at the top.

As of now, I have to go to every single folder, and click on the 'Date' column
header of every single folder to make each one sorted by descending date instead
of ascending.  This is tedious.  Especially when you have multiple computers
that you use thunderbird on and have to repeat the process for every one.

An action that simply "sort every folder like the current folder" would allow
you to quickly sort every folder a particular way, while still allowing for the
possibility to sort different folders in different ways in the future.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. open your imap account
2. try to cause every folder to sort messages in a different way than the default
3.

Actual Results:  
Lots and lots of mouse-clicking

Expected Results:  
Sort one folder once to taste, and then be able to apply it to every folder if
you wish.

Comment 1

[[e-mail]]

I think this is the same problem that motivated bug 86845, and bug 175502.

Comment 2

[Jason Spashett]

There is a usability problem if you have many folders, say on an imap server, or
when you add new folders quite often - like on a news server.

I would suggest the following for consideration. It seems to have quite a few
advantages:

After any sort order has been changed for any folder make the last sort order
set the "Default" sort order ( So on any newly created folders the default sort
order will be the last sort order chosen on a folder )

The advantages are:

a) Users that wish a particular order for all folders can get this by setting
the desired sort order on thier current folders and be sure to get thier desired
sort order for any new folders.

b) The net effort of changing the sort order is greatly reduced to a minimum
e.g. it's just as easy to set the sort order the same for all folders as it is
to set a different sort order on each folder you have.

c) A desired user behavior / expectation with no real feature discovery activity
necessary ( you don't have to find out how to use this feature - it's just 'there' )

d) No gui or prefereance changes necessary

e) Probably not too much development effort. But significant usability improvement

Comment 3

[Nick]

Another idea:

If ctrl is pressed when clicking on a header to change the sort order, it will
be changed and then a new window will appear in which the whole folder tree will
appear giving you the ability to select in which folders you wish to set the
current window's sort order as the default. Of course a "select all" and a
"select all subfolders of the selected folder" button should exist in there.
IMHO, it would help things a lot.

Comment 4

[George]

This is a much needed feature! (Bias warning: I have just logged into an IMAP
server with a lot of folders, all of which need the sort order changed.)