617142 - Add preference to change default search result sort order

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 663859

(Thunderbird :: Search, enhancement)

Description

[WBT]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101026 Firefox/3.6.12
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.12) Gecko/20101027 Lightning/1.0b2 Thunderbird/3.1.6

Often when I search all messages, I'm looking to find a very specific recent message.  I want the last message (or close to it) containing a specific phrase that I believe is probably in there.  
Instead, the search by relevance puts lots of other old messages up at the top and I have to wade through the sea of results manually to find what I'm looking for.  Or, I click sort by date and can find it pretty quickly.  I'd like a config option to make this the default search result behavior *for my machine only*.  Sort by relevance is a good standard default, but users like me prefer sort by date and we'd like to be able to do that by default.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Conduct a search over all messages.
2. Notice that search results are sorted by "relevance," which is some measure related to the occurrence of the search terms.  It is not relevant considering other information (such as "I know I sent/received that recently").  That other information is in the user's head, not entered to TB, so TB can't actually do a complete relevance sort. 

Actual Results:  
Sort by date is an option, but not default.

Expected Results:  
Allow me to change a config setting to have search results always sorted by date (descending), unless I click on relevance.

Comment 2

[WBT]

(In reply to comment #1)
> 
> *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 551649 ***


Bug 551649 is a mutliple-issue bug and this is a single-issue, that didn't seem to be listed as one that was previously broken out.

Comment 3

[WBT]

Removing duplicate status based on Comment 2.  551649 listed multiple issues (this was one) and Ludovic requested they be broken into multiple bugs.  Michelle broke out other items but not this one, so here's a single-issue bug that can be addressed.

Comment 4

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

bwinton, would you agree that we probably do not want an exposed preference for this and bug 742652, and that bug 663859 would be sufficient?

Comment 5

[Blake Winton (:bwinton) (:☕️)]

Yes, persisting the user's choices seems like a better idea than adding another option…