374009 - Sorting by date in a folder (Inbox, or others) is "backwards" compared to other sort fields (and industry standards)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 93772

(Thunderbird :: Mail Window Front End, defect)

Description

[Jim Tuttle]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418.9.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/419.3
Build Identifier: version 2 beta 2 (20070116)

In most fields (columns) in an email folder, clicking on the column header will cause the folder to be sorted by that column.  If there is an icon that looks like a "normal" triangle (point up), the expected sort order is "smaller" to "bigger" (that's what the triangle is trying to represent).  If the icon is inverted (point down), the expected sort order is "bigger" to "smaller".

On simple text fields like Subject, this works normally.  "A new project" would come before "Baseball game", etc.  However, on the Date field/column, the sort order is backwards to the expected result!  If the icon is pointing up, the "smaller" items (oldest dates) should come first, and the "larger" items (newest dates) should come last.  I know smaller and larger don't seem to apply to dates, but the same sorting principles apply.

Also, other email programs as well operating systems in general (Windows, Mac, etc.) treat their folder views (including sorting by Date) the "expected" way, not the way Thunderbird is sorting them.

Could this please be fixed?

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
Sort the Date field according to the instructions in the Details sections.
Actual Results:  
Sort order on the Date column is "backwards".

Expected Results:  
Sort order when the sort icon is pointing up should be oldest first.