315114 - Message Grouping by Date: category names are inaccurate for "week"

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 505981

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Chris]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.12) Gecko/20050922 Fedora/1.0.7-1.1.fc4 Firefox/1.0.7
Build Identifier: 1.0.7-1.1.fc4 (20050929)

The message grouping option puts messages older than two days into the 'Last Week' category. I believe 'Last Week' should only contain messages from the last sunday and older (or last saturday and older, depending on the locale setting concerning which day a week starts on). Two weeks ago would then contain the week before that week. Messages older than 'Yesterday' but newer than 'Last Week' should either be grouped by weekday name 'Monday', 'Tuesday', etc., or possibly just put in an 'Earlier this week' category. It is very unpractical and confusing that on a friday, messages from the previous friday end up in 'Two weeks ago'.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Sort messages by date
2. Enable group by sort

Actual Results:  
Messages are grouped according to age, with messages older than 2 days being described as 'last week', older than 7 days are 'two weeks ago', older than 14 days are 'old mail'.

Expected Results:  
The 'Last Week' category should contain messages from the period which is actually considered to be the week preceding the current week. Likewise, 'Two Weeks Ago' should contain the week before that. Messages older than 'Yesterday' but still from the current week should at the very least be put in 'Earlier this week', if not in 'Monday', 'Tuesday', etc. On the first day of the week, there should be no 'Yesterday' category, but only 'Today' and 'Last Week'.

Comment 1

[zug_treno]

Related to/duplicate of bug 263678?

Comment 2

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

Not a dupe -- that bug ended up focused on a related but different issue.

Comment 3

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

*** Bug 322472 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4

[Simon]

> Expected Results:  
> The 'Last Week' category should contain messages from the period which is
> actually considered to be the week preceding the current week. Likewise, 'Two
> Weeks Ago' should contain the week before that. Messages older than 'Yesterday'
> but still from the current week should at the very least be put in 'Earlier
> this week', if not in 'Monday', 'Tuesday', etc. On the first day of the week,
> there should be no 'Yesterday' category, but only 'Today' and 'Last Week'.

Agreed. I mocked up a desired behaviour SS in bug#263678. 

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=201588&action=view

Comment 7

[ovidiu]

I see this as a possible improvement and I would consider it especially within the calendar integration ideas. Meaning it may be more important for the sake of consistency, now that calendar is aimed to be better integrated.. (Also cause two weeks ago may not mean that much compared to the calendar week ..)

Also, I would point to bug 386950 for an extra clear date (week also?) presentation if this is going to change for the calendar weeks. In that way, it will be clear for the old users that the change has taken place and what weeks are we talking about. 

I'll make that depend on this one, but also consider that as a good point along .. (eventually, dependence may just be inverse ..)

Comment 8

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Confirming RFE.

Comment 9

[Steve Simms]

Another possibility would be to say "2-7 days ago", "7-14 days ago", etc.  It's not as elegant as "Past Week", "This Week", "Last Week", etc., but it does eliminate the confusion about when the week starts and ends.

Comment 11

[Joel Goguen]

This has also been reported at Launchpad (https://launchpad.net/bugs/237341) for Thunderbird 2.0.0.19, and I'm seeing the problem in Thunderbird 3.0 b3pre (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1b3pre) Gecko/20090227 Lightning/1.0pre Shredder/3.0b3pre).

Comment 12

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

I wonder if there is any real value of having both a "last week" and "two weeks ago". The use case for that seems quite weak. 

Maybe those two should be put together under a "Recent" (or something similar) header, avoiding the "week" issue in the process.

Comment 13

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

The proposal in comment 4 seems very unintuitive to me. Also this bug is very convoluted with lots of different proposal.

Therefore im duping this bug against bug 505981, because it has a much clearer purpose. Everyone CC'ed here who is interested in that bug as well, should CC himself there.