[OU] sorting email

[James Card]

On Wed, 04 Jun 2008 07:22:03 -0700, Malcolm Austen  
<malcolm.austen at oucs.ox.ac.uk> wrote:

> On Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:57:42 +0100, Luther Gulseth <lgulseth at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Is there a way to sort email by the time it was received and NOT the
>> time it was sent?
>
> Ah, yes, a long wished-for feature that Outlook Express has as standard

Yes, it is also Opera's standard of "sorting" messages. You'll notice that  
when you click on the Sent column header in the message list that Opera  
will sort the messages in ascending order (with the latest messages at the  
bottom), and there is a small icon added to the column header to indicate  
that they are sorted. Click on the header again and Opera sorts them in  
descending order, and changes the icon to indicate that their sort order  
has been changed. If you click the header again the message list is  
presented in its natural, unsorted state -- with the messages *received*  
last at the bottom of the list -- and the sort icon is removed. This same  
scheme is used when sorting by From, Subject, or Size; click once to sort  
in ascending order, again to sort in descending order, and a third time to  
return to unsorted.

Alas, it is not possible to sort by the time received with the most recent  
messages at the top of list, but the unsorted list is "sorted" by the  
order the message was received. As far as I know, Opera does not actually  
store the date and time the message was received (and it is not part of  
the standard e-mail headers, like the Sent time is) so it not possible to  
sort by that criteria. Each message is added to the end of the list as it  
is received, but no record is maintained of when that occurred. Note that  
this also means that when you import messages from another program or from  
an older version of Opera the imported messages are added to the end of  
the list, and will appear in the unsorted sequence as if they were  
received at the date/time you imported them.

Opera could solve this by adding a time-stamp header to each received  
message before storing it so that they could later be sorted by time  
received.

-- 
James Card  --  http://jdcard.com/
Often there are several ways to understand a given set of
facts; some of them may be more useful than others.