[Usability] useless message threading in Evolution

["Matthew Nuzum" <newz bearfruit org>]

I hope I'm not tiring people with my bug reports... please understand
my goal is to make systems better and to boost productivity.

Many cool e-mail programs have a threading feature that groups related
messages in chronological order. This makes it easy to see messages in
context.

Evolution has this feature, but as far as I can tell, it is crippled
severely because of the inability to sort message threads in a useful
way.

For example, if someone sends you a message, and you reply, then a
week later this person replies back, logically, the two messages they
sent are grouped together.

Unfortunately, if you've received 200 messages since then, you will
have to scroll down past those 200 messages to see the reply.

This is because when you sort your threaded display by "received date
(desc)" the received date of the *oldest* message in the thread is
used, not the newest.

To illustrate this better, I have a folder called "bugs" and filters
to put all my bug related e-mails there automatically.

There are over 1700 e-mails in this folder.

Some time ago, I got subscribed to a bug about pango. I get a couple
messages from this thread a month it seems. When I get a new message,
I have to scroll past 1500 or so e-mails to find the new one. The list
is so long, that I scroll relatively fast. However, scrolling fast
makes it incredibly easy to miss the unread message.

That's an exaggerated (but true) example, however this characteristic
of evolution hampers my e-mail reading every day.

I would love to see sorting of threads use the received date of the
newest msg in the thread rather than the oldest. This is how every
other MTA I have used displays messages.

Anyone willing to triage this and add comments?
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=412845

--
Matthew Nuzum
www.bearfruit.org
newz2000 on freenode