504776 - group messages by same sender like Gmail does

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Thunderbird :: Message Reader UI, enhancement)

Description

[elias.frantisek]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1) Gecko/20090707 Firefox/3.5
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.1pre) Gecko/20090716 Shredder/3.0b4pre

I often receive messages from same sender (notice etc.). I cannot group them or collapse them like threaded messages. By default Gmail sorts and collapses this kind of messages. I miss this feature it Thunderbird...

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Adam Porter]

I like this idea, but it needs to be explained more thoroughly with examples.

Comment 2

[Atul Jangra [:atuljangra]]

Any update on this? Are we going to implement this?

Comment 3

[Curieux]

Hello
I support the idea of grouping by senders.

The message list could be like this:

  Sender   Received    Title            ...
+ Mr. X    yesterday   About something
  Ms. Y    yesterday   Some title

Here the grouped messages line (from Mr. X) has a plus '+' sign at its beginning, while a single message line (from Ms. Y) does not.
Programmatically, the plus sign is an expand button. It may reside in it own column, in order to let the sender column be aligned (it is more readable).

I suggest the date and title are from the last message of the sender. And the line is bold when an unread message is added to its group.

Alternatively the number of messages in a grouped line could appear between brackets:

      Sender   Received    Title            ...
+ [4] Mr. X    yesterday   About something
      Ms. Y    yesterday   Some title

Comment 4

[alta88]

Sort by From (or correspondent, or anything else); View -> Sort By -> Grouped By Sort.

Comment 5

[Curieux]

(In reply to alta88 from comment #4)
> Sort by From (or correspondent, or anything else); View -> Sort By ->
> Grouped By Sort.

It does not work this way.

Personally, I sort by date of reception.
So when I "group by sort", it groups by date, not by sender.

If I "group discussions", it does not group by sender, but by subject (title).

As you can see, the problem is we can not group by sender, independently to the sorting column.
In fact we can not sort by something and group by something else (except by subject).

So, no, this report is not resolved and the subject should not be closed.

My suggestion is now to add a line in the menu: "group by..", below "sort by..".

Comment 6

[alta88]

I don't really understand how group by sender doesn't accomplish this, but it's not important.

The reality is that your specific organization/grouping/sort preference, outside of the existing capabilities of the threadpane, has effectively a zero chance of being implemented in the legacy c++/xul technologies.

Comment 7

[Curieux]

> it's not important

I see.

Technically, the list can be grouped by a criteria and sorted by another criteria.
It does it when we group "Threaded" (by subject/title), being sorted by any criteria (by Date for example) at the same time.
I just wondered if the list can be grouped by the Sender.

But don't worry, I will not insist.
Have a quiet day.

Comment 8

[alta88]

The request in this bug by the OP, to group by sender, is fully satisfied in existing functionality.

Your request, to do a secondary sort within grouped by sender, is another/different request. It is not an unreasonable request, and if there isn't already a bug for it you can file one of your very own rather than adding onto a similar bug, which isn't useful and is sometimes called 'hijacking'.

Also, threading is not 'grouping by subject', it is a specific term for collections of messages by internal reference id, as a result of reply chains, and each subject could be different.  The view that handles all other grouping criteria is Grouped By, where 'by subject' can be grouped which means by the subject text.  In case you didn't know, Threaded View does support secondary sorts, ie sort by Date (or other) col first, then by Sender col.