72872 - sort by sender doesn't also sort by date

Status: VERIFIED WORKSFORME

(SeaMonkey :: MailNews: Message Display, defect)

Description

[Leston Buell]

When you sort messages by sender, the messages sent by any particular sender
appear in an apparently random order, making it very hard to search for, say,
the most recent message from a particular sender. I think the behavior should be
either:

1. Probably the easiest behavior to implement: 
   Sorting by sender also sorts by date. So, when i sort by sender, i can 
   find all of the messages that "Fred" sent in "May" adjacent to each other 
   in the list.

2. The most desirable behavior:
   Sorting by any category, the sort order of the previous sort is preserved. 
   So, if you sort by sender, then by subject, you could find all of the 
   messages that "Fred" had written with the subject line "onions".

Comment 1

[(not reading, please use [e-mail] instead)]

our secondary sort should be "order received" which is close (but not the exact
same as date).

it's faster than doing date, since order receieved it's a simple PRUint32
compare, since it's a message id.  (date is a PRTime compare)

I'll investigate.

Comment 2

[scottputterman]

do we have any idea how much slower date as a secondary sort would be?

Comment 3

[Leston Buell]

I've recently ascertained that this is also a problem with sort by subject.
However, we do get a correct sort by date when clicking to sort by either status
or flag.

Is this really a Linux-only bug? I wish this would get fixed. It's really a pain
searching for the most recent messages from a particular sender or on a
particular topic.

Comment 4

[Leston Buell]

Using Linux build 2001091006, this appears to be fixed. If someone else can
verify this, this bug should be marked "Works for me" or "Fixed".

Comment 5

[Michael Tiemann]

Defintely *not* fixed in 0.9.4 when the folder is "Sent" and you sort by
recipient.  In that case, the sort by date was all over the map!

M

Comment 6

[Leston Buell]

Using 2001091006, i went into my Sent folder and sorted by recipient. The
messages were secondarily sorted by date, as desired. Could you please try with
a later build? Maybe this started working after the 0.9.4 branch.

Note that the sort does not sort by first recipient, but by the entire line of
"To:" recipients. So, if you have a few messages just to Juan, and another few
messages to both Juan and Hans, those two groups of messages will be in separate
sort groups (first all of the messages to Juan, and then all of those to Juan
and Hans), even though you'll only ever see Juan in the "Recipient Column".
(Hans will  never show up in the Recipient column.) You'll need to expand the
message headers to see this. I don't know if this is really the desired behaviour.

Comment 7

[Leston Buell]

Can this be marked FIXED or WORKSFORME yet? This has been working for me since
at least mid-September 2001 on Linux. Could someone please verify this on
another platform?

Comment 8

[scottputterman]

I'm pretty sure we secondary sort by order received which is close enough. 
cc'ing David to verify this.

Comment 9

[David :Bienvenu]

yes, we do a secondary sort by order received, in case of ties. This should
approximate sort by date unless you move messages around between folders often
(and not with message filters). I just tried a sort by sender, my messages were
secondarily sorted by order received/date.

Comment 10

[scottputterman]

I'm going to mark this WFM.  If someone really wants secondary sort by date
instead of order received, you can reopen, but the bug will be marked future.

Comment 11

[laurel]

marking verified worksforme based on putterman's last comment.