On Mon Mar 3 15:03:20 2008, Cyrus Daboo wrote: > --On March 2, 2008 11:07:50 PM -0800 Dan Karp <dkarp@xxxxxxxxxx> > wrote: > >> The purpose of sorting in mail clients is so that users can find >> messages they're looking for. > > Actually you need to look at your use cases in more detail because > a lot of times searching is a much better solution than sorting. > e.g. the case of trying to find email from a particular person - a > search is much better. Yes you do have to do a little more work to > setup the search (type something in) rather than the single click > sorting requires, but on large mailboxes you will usually see what > you want immediately without having to scroll through the sorted > list looking for what you want. > > I don't think Dan's saying that using SORT for searching is a good idea, but it's certainly what people do based on my observations, too. (In some clients, the sorted list is scrolled to whichever message was previously selected, so it's a fast way of finding other messages by the same person). > For the most part I question why anyone would really want to sort > on any of the text fields. The only sort I have found useful is > sort by size - and then only to help in culling large messages when > my quota-limited mailboxes get full. My client does no sorting at all, so I'm hard pressed to give any alternative use-cases. Generally, people seem to like sorting by date fields, though again not a text field. I've also seen people who like to sort by subject, essentially as a grouping thing - better done with threading, but still. > View filtering can often be done with a single click (e.g. > option-click on the from address of a message currently in view > causes the view to show only those messages with that address). > This is far superior to sorting. My client does the same (albeit with different clicks involved), and I too find it very useful. I'm not sure I'd say "far superior to sorting", since I don't see them as related, but I get your drift. Still, though, the presence of useless SORT keys would only be a significant problem if they were especially difficult to implement, and the large deployments of SORT indicate that they're not. Even if it's only PINE, that's still a pretty vast number of users who may be relying on this behaviour. When I last brought this up, I got the impression that it was considered by the vast majority that it was simply too late to change FROM to be useful. Dave. -- Dave Cridland - mailto:dave@xxxxxxxxxxxx - xmpp:dwd@xxxxxxxxxx - acap://acap.dave.cridland.net/byowner/user/dwd/bookmarks/ - http://dave.cridland.net/ Infotrope Polymer - ACAP, IMAP, ESMTP, and Lemonade _______________________________________________ IETF mailing list IETF@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf