Re: [Usability] useless message threading in Evolution

[Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>]

Recent versions of evolution sort threads by the most recent reply. The
date for the toplevel message in a thread, is shown with the date of the
latest reply as well, in the event the thread is collapsed.

I don't know about Received Date, but sorting by "Date" works fine for
me. The feature probably isn't bug free, either, though.

-- dobey


On Tue, 2007-02-27 at 17:47 -0600, Matthew Nuzum wrote:
> 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
>