363991 - Sorting by Tags needs to be chronological, not by Order Received.

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, enhancement)

Description

[Troy W.]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0

This bug applies to only Thunderbird 2.0 beta. 

In Thunderbird 1.5, a new feature was requested so that when sorting by Tags, messages are still sorted in chronological order. 

I am happy to see this was finally implemented in Thunderbird 2.0beta, but the approach was wrong. When messages are sorted by Tag, messages are subsorted by Order Received, not by date. In theory, one might think this would work, but not all messages sequentially received arrive in chronological order. 

For instance, let's say I receive a message with a timestamp of 12/10/2006 8:00pm, and we'll say that's message #14025. However, if I receive a message with a timestamp of 12/10/2006 7:46pm later that day (maybe the sender's clock was wrong), that message is numbered 14026. Tag sorting subsorts the messages by the order received, not by chronological order. This needs to be rectified.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Set the mail window to display Tag and Order Received columns. 
2. Click the Tag column to sort by tag.


Actual Results:  
Tagged messages are correctly sorted first. However, they (and untagged messages) are not sub-sorted chronologically, but rather by message number (Order Received).

Expected Results:  
Messages should be sub-sorted in chronological order, not by order received.



Feature enhancement suggestion for future versions of Thunderbird: 
An option should be given to allow the user to specify a secondary sorting order (such as by Name or by Subject) if date is not desired. In the meantime, this is a bug that needs to be rectified.

Comment 1

[Troy W.]

Attachment: Screenshot

This is a screenshot which should show the bug in question. Please observe the Order Received, Date, and Tag columns.

Comment 2

[Magnus Melin [:mkmelin]]

Confirming RFE.

Comment 3

[Tuukka Tolvanen (sp3000)]

I thought secondary sort was always "no sort" i.e. mailbox order i.e. usually "order received", but bug 15142 seems to claim a secondary sort by date (in what direction?) was implemented once upon a time. Assuming there is indeed no secondary sorting regardless of primary sort key, this should probably be the moer general "Secondary sorting needs to be chronological, not by Order Received." since doing it only for tags (this bug) or for watched (bug 231945) would be weird.

Comment 4

[Mike Cowperthwaite]

It's not clear to me that this isn't a dupe of bug 57898.  If we made the change to perform secondary sorting on Date rather than Order Received, we'd immediately get complaints that it's sorting on Date header rather than Received date, or vice versa.  And if this change *were* made, it certainly should not be limited to tags.

Comment 5

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

Bryan, will this and bug 348350 be an issue for the TB3 "starred folder" idea?

Comment 6

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

I didn't get to push on the starred folder so I couldn't determine if those would be a limiting factor.

Comment 7

[Dirk Muders]

Coming from https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=57898 and searching for related bugs I found this one. It sounds like some change along the lines of this ticket was made since there was a change from secondary sort of "Tag" and "Order received" working in TB 2 to not working anymore in TB 3. This feature was quite useful for me because I had been missing out on messages with wrong dates from misconfigured machines. So I usually sort by "Order received" and in addition I would like to sort by "Tag" to highlight important messages at the top of the list, but still sorted by "Order received" within each tag block. In spite of fixes in 57898, this is still not working. Maybe some controls on which columns get "auto-sorted" are necessary.