Speaking as email client user: Dave Cridland wrote: >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). > > Yea, I do this frequently in Thunderbird. >>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. > > I frequently sort by subject, because many clients still don't support proper threading (threads can become broken due to lack of the References header). I also sort by IMAP flags (i.e. I want to see all important messages), size and rarely by date. _______________________________________________ IETF mailing list IETF@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf