Thunderbird: Group by date

[axel]

I'd like to suggest to group messages in your inbox by date. E.g. Today, Yesterday, etc.
 

[Jon]

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

[rpedrica]

This is already possible so not a new idea:

View -> Sort By ->

- Date

- Descending

- Grouped By Sort

[tripleo]

@rpedrica @axel Maybe it's too hard to find? (Like this website?)

Hmm?

[axel]

Right on. I can see that it fulfills all requirements to organize bulks of emails, but IMHO this feature isn't very well integrated yet. It looks outdated and the thread-view takes up too much space to permanently integrate it into one's every day email-tasks. I'm glad the feature already exists, but concerning that matter, I'd like to strongly suggest a UI update.

[wsmwk]

Hi Axel. Thanks for the feedback.

Can you describe please, in what way does the thread view take too much space for every day usage?

[rpedrica]

@axel, I find the opposite - this view is not threaded so confused as to your reference. Personally I find this the most compact view allowing date arrangement. Certainly, no other email client I'm aware of provides this style of sorting in such a compact view.

If you are still of the opinion that it's not optimal, please indicate the specifics of what you would suggest instead.

[axel]

Hi there,

I think it's compact vertically because it creates a dense looking list. But horizontally it eats up space by introducing a threaded tree icon to the left of the subject, which takes up important space, especially if you choose the vertical view layout on a laptop screen.

As a result, I wouldn't leave it on all the time, but only for special occasions.

But it takes a lot of navigating through the menu to get to the preferred option to make it threaded and sorted by date. I don't find that intuitive.

For example, instead of the threaded tree, I'd prefer a simple, unobtrusive header that says: "Today", "Tuesday, April 11", etc. Which, of course, my subjective point of view.

[fung0]

I couldn't survive without the current Grouped By Sort option. It keeps my inbox manageable, and makes it easy to find older messages. I'd love to see more options - such as sorting messages within a date either ascending or descending, or defining group levels - such as 2021, 2022, instead of the current "Older" grab-bag.

While on the subject, more date format options would also be nice.

[rpedrica]

@axel, you can have threaded or group by sort, but not both. So the following statement:

"eats up space by introducing a threaded tree icon to the left of the subject", which takes up important space, especially if you choose the vertical view layout on a laptop screen."

... doesn't make sense.

"But it takes a lot of navigating through the menu to get to the preferred option to make it threaded and sorted by date. I don't find that intuitive."

I agree the menu items could do with some work. But note that sort by date (ie. click the column header of the date column) is not the same as "grouped by sort".

"For example, instead of the threaded tree, I'd prefer a simple, unobtrusive header that says: "Today", "Tuesday, April 11", etc. Which, of course, my subjective point of view."

This is exactly what "grouped by sort" does.

Menu -> view -> sort by -> grouped by sort

From my understanding of your post, this is already possible.

[Seamaiden]

My reply references 2 previous comments, which are shown below. Please expand Group By Sort to enable the user to specify custom time period(s) for grouping. Grouping by year would be awesome and should definitely be added, but why not also have some kind of option to allow month grouping within each year.

fung0 wrote:

"Grouped By Sort.makes it easy to find older messages. I'd love to see more options - such as sorting messages within a date either ascending or descending, or defining group levels - such as 2021, 2022, instead of the current "Older" grab-bag... more date format options would also be nice."

rpedrica wrote:

"you can have threaded or group by sort, but not both...sort by date (ie. click the column header of the date column) is not the same as "grouped by sort".

[MattAuSupport]

So this is what it looked like of version 102.  Interestingly, the text is further to the right in version 115. Wasting even more space on the line where the email information is supposed to be as now we have a thread toggle button that has nothing to do with the emails being displayed included in the heading of the list view.

[Michael_K]

Group by Year instead of "older" would be great!

[Michael_K]

Group by year (2022, 2023, 2024) instead of "older" would be great!