528016 - Messages with future dates (>= tomorrow) badly break "Group by sort", missing group header string "Future Dates"

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 478863

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Attachment: Screenshot: Group by sort (on date) breaks on future dates

While testing for Bug 378576 (Problem with Messages sorted or grouped by date when passing midnight), I manipulated my system date to be tomorrow and sent some messages with tomorrows date. Such messages can always occur when the sender's machine, for whatever reasons, has the wrong date set (future dates). After receiving these mails (on my machine now with correct date), this breaks "Group by sort" rather badly, creating all sorts of useless and unlabelled group headers that won't go away afterwards. I don't have time for STR, maybe later.

We do need a group header string for "Future Dates" and collect these properly under that heading, regardless of the circumstances.

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

I do have a patch that just puts those messages in Today, though I suppose we could put them in "Future".

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Well, I suppose we /should/ put them in "Future" because there's certainly something wrong with the date and so messing up today's group with them may not be the right thing to do.

Comment 3

[Frank Burleigh]

Attachment: Screenshot showing non-functional group and "false" indication of no "future" email

I experience something similar but think the result is a little worse than you describe.

* the "group by" header for the future items has no label, only the open/close triangle.  That triangle doesn't open the "future" mail items.  If I click around the header I can sometimes see a (false) count of future messages.  For example, right now I have one such message, but the count (momentarily) told me I had two.

* Since the triangle doesn't open the group, I can't get to the mail without changing the view characteristics.  Many people will not know what this is about, so won't know to do that.

FWIW:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091125 Lightning/1.0pre Shredder/3.0.1pre

Comment 6

[Nathan Tuggy (:tuggyne)]

It looks like this might be a dupe of bug #478863, as the descriptions are very similar. Opinions on proper resolution seem to differ between the bugs, though, so if this is a dupe, some comments should be migrated across.

Comment 7

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Thanks Nathan, indeed this seems to be a duplicate of bug 478863, which has better STR in bug 478863 comment 2.