GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 652821
[MessageList] Sort thread children ascending
Last modified: 2018-10-26 09:56:42 UTC
I often find the way Evo sorts messages when they are grouped by thread very confusing when sorting most recent messages at the top (it works right when sorting most recent last). It's absolutely counter-intuitive, and even after using it for years I can't get used to it. So I suspect it might be the same for many people. Consider the general schema: [Message #1] [Message #5] [Message #4] [Message #3] [Message #2] That's really not practical: you need to click on the message at the top, then click on the one at the bottom of the thread. If you do it using navigation keys, that's absolutely inefficient. And conceptually, the sort order isn't respected, since message #1, the oldest, is at the *top*. The other solution is IMO much saner: sort threads by most recent message, but *within threads*, sort messages with the oldest at the top. This matches what would happen if we decided to show messages in a single page, à la Google Wave (Allan Day had mockups for that). That's the natural way. Another proof of my position is the funny message at the top of GNOME mailing list archives [1]: > Within a single thread, the first mail note is the START of the thread; the > notes following that are in the chronological order of when they were > received. So globally, newest messages are at the top, but within a thread, > the oldest (the start of the thread) is at the top. > > If you think about it, it is confusing. Just go with the flow and > everything will be all right. I think the comment is right: it's hard to explain, but it's damn intuitive. Any other solution is crap. ;-) What people want when they say "most recent at the top", is most recent threads, not most recent messages: we're not maniacs of logical ordering... [OK, another harsh report, but that's because I still believe we can make Evo a really good mail app.] 1: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2011-May/thread.html
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 309701 ***
*** Bug 309701 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
While using Evo for reading mailinglists I've found this bug still active after 7 years from the original report. Nothing else to add, just to remark that, in thread/date/descending order, it's very hard to read and to follow the thread of thoughts, so I temporarly switched to ascending order.
(In reply to Francesco from comment #3) > While using Evo for reading mailinglists I've found this bug the discussion that lead to it is here: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/evolution-list/2018-October/msg00107.html
There's a bug that an option: $ gsettings get org.gnome.evolution.mail thread-children-ascending is not properly propagated into the internal structures. I fixed it with the below change. I also removed some now useless code, thus the message list regeneration should be quicker. Users whom do not like this new behaviour can disable it with: $ gsettings set org.gnome.evolution.mail thread-children-ascending false while the default is 'true'. Evolution behaves differently than Thunderbird, it doesn't dictate "sort by date" for thread children, it respects the filtering set by the user for the thread children, it only switches the order to ascending, if needed. Created commit 79f9e4fa62 in evo master (3.31.2+) Created commit 24507a67fb in evo gnome-3-30 (3.30.3+)