886122 - Quick filter on large folder with many messages reveals oldest matches first; starting with newest would be better (when building the results list)

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 474730

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[Patrick Julian]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8; rv:22.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/22.0 (Beta/Release)
Build ID: 20130617145905

Steps to reproduce:

Apply a quick filter (Shift Cmd K on Mac) to a folder of messages with lots of emails (> 2K) from various years


Actual results:

Matching filter results appeared one by one, oldest matches first


Expected results:

For my understanding, the newest matches are normally the most relevant, so the filter should scan through the folder contents beginning with the newest.

At least if the sort of the folder is set to "by date, descending" (which is the case for me).

Comment 1

[Matt B]

I was going to open something just like this.

This logic should be changed as this person suggests. Returning the oldest emails first is counterintuitive.

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I can't reproduce this (invalid). By date, descending vs. ascending wfm as expected for quick filter results.

Are you viewing message list in threaded mode? (View > Sort By > Threaded; and you'll see thread icons in your message list)

Comment 3

[Patrick Julian]

Hi Thomas,

I think we are talking about different things.
You seem to be referring to the list of search results when all results have been returned.
I am talking about the timespan while the result list is being "constructed".
In that timespan, oldest emails are popping up first. I hope this additional description makes it more clear what I mean.

Comment 4

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to spam from comment #3)
> Hi Thomas,
> I am talking about the timespan while the result list is being "constructed".
> In that timespan, oldest emails are popping up first. I hope this additional
> description makes it more clear what I mean.

Ah, right, I see.
Are you a coder so that you could look into this? TB is maintained by volunteers...

Comment 5

[Jim Porter (:squib)]

I tested this on an IMAP account, and the search results add the newest messages first, so this may already work. It also only took a couple of seconds for a body search on a folder with 20,000 messages, so it's probably hard to tell unless you have giant folders of messages.

For people experiencing this issue, what type of account are you testing with? IMAP, POP, news, RSS, the local folders account?

Comment 6

[Patrick Julian]

I had reported the issue with reference to v17.
I just updated to v24 for comparison and as indicated by Jim, it seems to work fine in v24 (i.e. way faster and newest first).
My tests were on an IMAP account plus my (fairly large) local folders.

As it works for me after the update, I close the ticket as "works for me".

Comment 7

[Matt B]

Yeah, this seems fine now. Results are very fast and are returned as expected (newest to oldest).