Re: Last Call: draft-ietf-imapext-sort (INTERNET MESSAGE ACCESS PROTOCOL - SORT AND THREAD EXTENSIONS) to Proposed Standard

Hi Dan,

--On March 2, 2008 11:07:50 PM -0800 Dan Karp <dkarp@zimbra.com> 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.

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. The rest of the time I either use no sort, or threading, or view 
filtering (view only the results of a search). 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. At least that works well 
for me. Others may have different ways of processes their email where 
sorting may make more sense.

-- 
Cyrus Daboo

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