Sorting and Grouping Messages

Message sorting is an often-ignored but very powerful tool. The easiest sort is to click the various message list headers, such as subject, sender, date, and so on. Click one time to sort in ascending order and a second time to toggle the ascending/descending order.

Most Thunderbird users have only a few columns displayed, and using the click-to-sort technique is useful only if the column to be sorted is displayed. Sometimes you sort on fields other than those you can see; to do this, you use a more advanced sort technique.

In Thunderbird's View menu, you can select Sort by (see Figure 11.3). Under Sort by is a list of fields: Ascending, Descending, Threaded, Unthreaded, and Grouped By Sort.

Figure 11.3. Sorting on fields that are not displayed is possible from the Thunderbird menu.

The fields are mutually exclusive, as are Ascending/Descending and Threaded/Unthreaded/Grouped By Sort. Thunderbird allows sorting on only one field at a time.

The three mutually exclusive options (Threaded, Unthreaded, and Grouped) let you organize messages either by topic (threaded) or into groups.

For example, you can sort by date and then group based on that sort. This could result in groups for old mail, last week, yesterday, and today. Grouping by sender would create groups for each sender. Any field that can be sorted can also be grouped.

Tip

You can add fields (columns) in the view by clicking the button at the far right of the view's header bar. This button is to the right of the Date column in Figure 11.3.