305741 - reversed thread option (newest is the root, not oldest)

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Florian Schnabel]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de-DE; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050717 Firefox/1.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; de-DE; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050717 Firefox/1.0.6

when u got a folder, for example for a mailing lsit in threaded view, sorting by
date sorts by the date of the 1st message in the tread.
so far so obvious

problem is currently there is no way to have the newest message in a thread be
the "head" one .. i'll try to explain what i mean ..

if you got a bunch of messages named a-f that arrived in taht order the thread
is sorted like
a
 b
  c
   d

and so on ...
so the message that started the thread is the "top" one and all follow-ups are
in a tree beneath it.
now if you want to sort via date so u got the threads with the most recend (and
probably unread) messages 1st u just can't do it

adding an option to list threads "outward" e.g.

d
 c
  b
   a

would solve that handling problem
also, it would spare you browsing through all the messages in the thread to find
the new one(s)

i list this as a bug because i (and at least i think other users too) would
expect the latest message to be displayed 1st, and older messages in a tree
below it not the other way round

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[zug_treno]

Duplicate of bug 218554?

Comment 2

[Florian Schnabel]

sorta ..
i think my description is a bit more complete though ..
couldn't find the other bug in search when i checked if it was already reported
somewhere

Comment 3

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

You're right, the description of this bug is more complete.  The summary of this 
bug is much worse, however, so I'm copying that bug's summary over to this one.

However, I think this request is not such a good idea.  If a response thread has 
a complex branching structure, the reversed tree would be harder to follow (IMO) 
and would also require reordering branches as newer items arrive.

Comment 4

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** Bug 218554 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 5

[Mark Warren]

Bug 20385 "Thread View: Sort threads by date of newest message" (resolved, fixed) explains how to sort threads by the date of the newest message in the thread.  View menu, Sort by..., Date + Ascending + Threaded.  Does this provide the functionality requested?

Comment 6

[Bill McGonigle (not currently reading bugmail; please contact directly)]

In my case I just want the thread sort order to match the mailbox sort order.  So if my mailbox is in descending (usually) the thread should also be in descending.

I'm curious if anybody on this bug wants the mailbox to be in ascending mode and the threads in descending mode, or if a match is simply what's desired.