309975 - identites are sorted by creation time - better by email address

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 384303

(Thunderbird :: Account Manager, enhancement)

Description

[Poor Yorick]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050716 Firefox/1.0.6

If you have many identities, it is hard to go through an effectively unsorted
list when looking for an email address to use in the "sender" field.  It would
be nice to be able to sort by email address (better than sort by name, because
the names is often identical)

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.look at the manage identities window.  Entries are sorted by time of creation
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Tom Metro]

I'll second this.

In addition, once you exceed some threshold number of identities, like 10 perhaps, the drop-down list should switch to a hierarchical control that has the account as the first selection, then cascades to show the identities for that account.

Though I read in other bugs that people are proposing making identities independent of accounts, which obviously would make this last change moot.

My understanding is that you can manually work around this limitation by editing prefs.js and modifying a line like:
user_pref("mail.account.account1.identities", "id1,id7,id8,...id50");

for the desired account and rearrange the idN identifiers to reflect the order you want.

Attached is a Perl script, sort_accts.pl, that when ran with prefs.js as the argument, will generate a new set of mail.account.accountN.identities lines with the identities sorted by email address. It skips accounts that have only one identity, and it preserves the first identity position, which is usually the primary identity for an account. It doesn't modify prefs.js. It's up to you to cut-and-paste the output into your prefs.js.

 -Tom

Comment 2

[Tom Metro]

Attachment: Perl script that implements a workaround for this bug

Comment 3

[Pander]

When superseding bug 384303 is fixed, this one can be closed too.

Comment 4

[:aceman]

This is a specific request that may not appeal to all users. Also keep in mind that the order of identities in important in that way, that the first one is used as default in some automatic operations. So the first one in alphabetic ordering may not be the one you wish to be default. So a more universal way would be to allow the user to order the identities manually any way he wishes. And that is bug 384303.