GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 557391
The "group by thread" feature does not honor the ordering criterion I want to use in the date column
Last modified: 2020-10-29 17:17:09 UTC
The "group by thread" feature does not honor the ordering criterion I want to use in the date column. E.g. if I turn on "group by thread", the threads are grouped correctly and in chronological order (oldest items at top, new at bottom). If I then change the ordering to "new items at top", the sorting inside the thread list is still "new items at bottom", although the thread group per se is inserted at the correct position in the list. Distribution: Ubuntu 8.04 (hardy) Gnome Release: 2.22.3 2008-07-09 (Ubuntu) BugBuddy Version: 2.22.0
I can confirm this happens with Evolution 2.22.3.1 on Fedora 9 The threaded view sorts messages top-down over time, latest at the bottom, and it seems to me there is no way to reverse it. Perhaps this is not so much a bug as a lack of feature to be able to thread in the opposite direction. The Gnome developers would do well to consider the "group by conversation" feature in outlook, which is really a reverse of the evolution threading facility (with breaks in-between subjects for greater clarity when scanning a busy listing). What I'd like to achieve is latest messages come in at the top of their thread, so you can read backwards in time as you look downward. This is the only threading-sort-order that would make any sense for people that have new messages arrive at the top of the screen. New messages at the top seems pretty standard among all the users I've ever seen using email at work and I expect they'd be pretty miffed if they had to change their habit here. As matters stand one is forced to either work unconventionally and have new messages arrive at the bottom of the screen or go without threading. I do without threading until at work, where I use outlook. In this area the outlook developers seem to have done their usability homework right. Time to catch up? Just to add - as a work around I tried 'group by - subject' but it didn't seem to work at all. Jacek
Any update regarding this?
Do you need more feedback regarding this issue? Can I provide some more info that would be helpful? Just tell me what you need.
Seems like a duplicate of bug #484839, which is supposed to be fixed since 2.29.1. Can any of you confirm it's the same thing, and maybe close this bug as a duplicate?
I have 2.29.2 on Fedora 12 and I still see this bug! :( Look at my screenshots. One conversation is threaded but most of them are not!?! Am I doing something wrong or is this bug somehow making some conversations threaded and some not.
Created attachment 150336 [details] evolutions views Here is how I setup Evolution to have threaded conversations.
Sorry for wrong info. I have Evolution 2.28.2
"Fall back to threading by subject" enabled under Edit->Preferences->Mailer-> General - fixed the issue for me. This seams like reasonable thing to be enabled by default, no?
Nope Valent, your issue seems to be with message itself, not containing necessary information for threading, either because of the server or a (sender's) client, or, as you are probably seeing this on Evolution MAPI, in the translation between MAPI and Evolution structures. This MAPI bug is unrelated to this one. Please file a new bug report for it. Thanks.
After reading the previous comments, assuming the problem is fixed by bug 484839 in versions 2.30 and later. Please reopen if this is not the case and provide your version and distribution. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 484839 ***
I'd reopen if I knew how. Problem as stated in Comment 1 still "not fixed", everything same as before. Checked on Evo 3.2.2 FC16
I see. Thanks.
This problem still persists in evolution-3.12.11-1.fc21.x86_64. This problem is now almost 7!! years old, so any chance this will get fixed? I use Evolution with exchange OWA daily, and this will make usability/readability so much more convenient, especially when you are used to outlook. Maybe one addition; when you collapse a thread, it shows the oldest message instead of the newest. It will be much more convenient when the newest message is the one shown when the thread is collapsed so you can read the latest message in the thread (which you want to read, the rest is old news)
Age of a bug report is completely irrelevant criteria. :) Given extremely limited manpower, the best chance to get this fixed is to contribute a software patch: https://wiki.gnome.org/Git/Developers
Bug #692557 related, its fix will be part of 3.18.0 in the autumn. Still, maybe I misunderstood this bug report. I'm a little confused. Let's have apart that there can be multiple new messages within a thread, then if the latest received is picked as the thread root, then you may read something what doesn't make sense, because it requires other new messages to be read first. Let's have this thread: Old1 Old2 New1 Old3 Old4 Old5 New2 New3 Old6 which shows six "old" messages, already read and received in this order, and three "new" messages, currently received. You cannot change the thread root, that would break things (there is no reference that Old5 would belong under New2, the references are in the opposite "direction"). The only sorting can be done in the levels, in columns, that is (for newest at the top and using subthread to determine the date of that branch): Old1 Old4 New3 Old5 New2 Old2 New1 Old6 Old3 And for this was added the option in bug #692557, because it's not always usable for all users.
I don't think you have new and old messages, just messages with the same subject received at a certain date/time. Maybe to simplify things: Right now when you collapse the thread, you see the datestamp of the latest message, but when you click on it you see the content first message (root?). This should be the message that corresponds to the date shown.
The new messages in my example are "new" like "unread, received just now". The date thing, it's due to the "thread-latest" option in org.gnome.evolution.mail GSettings path, which, if set to true, makes the thread sort by the latest message in it.
This bug still exists in 3.18.5.2
Created attachment 374299 [details] a thread The examples of the comment #15 shows it very well. Once it's a real tree it cannot be with multiple roots, put up side down. The conversation view flattens the view, which one needs to be used to, because it won't work well (for example) for me. Especially when there tree contains several subtrees. Reading messages from the latest also feels bad, because reading replies to something I didn't read yet, which may or may not be part of the current message (part of the quoting). Consider the attached thread. It has several "leaf" messages and contains 4 main sub-threads. Evolution shows it right. How would you present it in the threaded view as a tree? Have the message from the Tue as the root (the first message)? And then what? I'm sorry, I do not see it how to show it as a tree. I'm sure the conversation view has its benefits, but it cannot be good for everything. Still I agree it's usable for your use case, when you do not really need threaded view, but just something close to it. Let's make this by the conversation view then.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 258233 ***