[pmmail-list] Sorting unread mail

[Dr. Martin R. Hadam]

On Tue, 28 Aug 2001 12:22:33 -0400 (EDT), Bruce Francis wrote:

>I certainly don't *need* all the options either, but after you've been
>reading here for a while you'll quickly discover that there are hundreds
>of different opinions of "need" .... yours is different from mine, but both
>of ours are probably a lot less than the typical writer here.

 I don't think one should convert sorting of an email folder into
rocket science. Most options are pretty straight forward and most
likely sufficient for all of us, imho.

>There are at least 4 states for "Read Status", maybe more.  I think this
>is the real problem for most, and could be solved by breaking those apart.

 The problem is only with the "read status" and this is - as you note -
because the key is rather ill-defined. Considering the need for a
change and the presumed resources such a change might take, I think
that separating out the "true" read status (i.e. message UNREAD) is
sufficient to cover most needs.

 I remember way back when it was claimed that such change would require
a whole redesign (almost like rewriting pmmail from scratch <g>). It
could be that the code for the sort priority is a single digit only
(guessing from folder.ini) and thus it might be difficult to enlarge
that number (there are already 10 options). But there could be a switch
in the account notebook (or even on the folder settings) that changes
"read-satus" behaviour from observing all attributes to unread only.
Done. Last not least, no-one will convince me that the above requires
major changes to the program code. It's also inherently compatible with
v1.x (in that the "unread-only" does not work and you need to re-index
your folders once, in case one was downgrading).

>Then "ascending" and "descending" might make more sense.

 I know that you can complicate everything by allowing sorts into
differing directions: say date&time received as ascending and date&time
of message descending (and other utterly nonsensical stuff <g>).

 From a practical point of view, "ascending" is probably a useful
default for alphabetical sorting and descending for time-based sorting.
Luckily, with the sort direction to "ascending", unread is also put on
top - so there is n problem whatsoever. OTOH, if your relevant index
(other than the above "unread") is time, then "unread" messages are
always on top as they tend to be the latest ones. Hence, ascending vs
descending becomes a moot point in this respect, anyway.

 I'm saying this because in recent weeks I've been (and still am) quite
short on time and I've repeatedly been dealing with hundreds of unread
messages in different folders. There are threads, which I'd like to
follow even then and I must say that PMMail has NOT been helpful with
managing that task.

 Martin

 Martin R. Hadam
 Kinderklinik - Medizinische Hochschule
 D-30623 Hannover
 Germany
 Email: Hadam.Martin@MH-Hannover.de