Closed Bug 260135 Opened 20 years ago Closed 20 years ago

when viewing message threads, the threads themselves should be sorted by last message in thread, not first message

Categories

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

enhancement
Not set
normal

Tracking

(Not tracked)

RESOLVED WORKSFORME

People

(Reporter: jonathan.payne, Assigned: mscott)

Details

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10

One of the nicest things about google's gmail is that you can sort message
threads  by the date of the last message in that thread.  I think the mac os X
mail reader also does the same thing.

Using message threads is very convenient but it's a problem when new messages
come in to that thread and you don't see it because the thread is 5 pages up in
the message list window because the thread was started three days ago.


Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.
When sorted by date, the most recent message in the thread *is* used; for the 
other criteria, the topmost message is used.  However, when reading in new 
messages, the threads are not reordered dynamically (which I think is what 
bug 207766 is about).

The easy workaround is to simply resort.
I did not realize that the correct way to turn on threads and maintain sorting
by date is to use View -> Sort -> Date and also have the Threaded option
selected.  I've always just pressed the Thread column in the message list to
turn on threading, and I am still not entirely sure what that does ...
OK, so it's true, if you get new mail the threads stay the way they are, but if
you leave the mailbox and come back, the threads move around to their new
position based on the date of the last message in the thread.

And I see that the original response indicates that Order Received does not get
this special treatment, so now I am a sort-by-Date kind of guy ...

This is almost perfect but if possible I would like an option to resort the
threads when new mail comes in.  I think that as long as the current message is
still selected after the resorting, then I will not mind that I might be moved
around in my message list in some potentially dramatic ways.

Now it's up to "the powers that be" to decide whether this option would be
acceptable and whether it's pretty easy to implement.
After email discussion with reporter, => WFM
Status: UNCONFIRMED → RESOLVED
Closed: 20 years ago
Resolution: --- → WORKSFORME
agree with reporter - threaded view is not usable unless new messages appear at
the top. Please see gmail for a successful implementation of threading.
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