[Kde-pim] Review Request: kmail - please add ability to display and sort by date received

[104624.2404 at compuserve.com]

Thomas, Ingo,

Thanks for your comments.

Item ID doesn't provide a reliable date sorting mechanism for archives
or imported emails, because the order in which emails are added to a
folder has no reliable relation to the date on which the email was sent
or received. 

Similarly, an email inadvertently moved to a subfolder as part of a
group selected in a word search, and then returned to the original
folder would no longer be in the same storage order in the original
folder.

The ability in earlier versions of KMail to sort in descending storage
order used to be a helpful partial solution to KMail's unreliable
date-sorting function.  But "Order of Arrival" isn't an accurate
description of this capability because, as mentioned above, the order in
which emails are added to a folder has no reliable relation to the order
in which emails were actually sent or arrived. 

The only reliable way to ensure that KMail users can sort emails by date
is to extract the date from the Received header, which unlike the
unreliable Date header, is always consistently time-stamped and
formatted by the recipient's ISP, and always consistently located after
the last semi-colon at the end of the top Received header.

As mentioned in one of the underlying bug reports, this isn't just a
date-sorting problem with spam.  This bug also affects emails from
senders in different time zones, and emails from senders whose computers
have the wrong system date for some reason.  Some vendors, such as
active.com and ftd.com, occasionally omit Date headers from emails to
customers.  Should KMail not have the ability to reliably sort any of
these emails by date?

If KMail is intended to offer a viable alternative to users of
Evolution, Outlook, Outlook Express, Opera, Lotus Notes or any other
industry-standard email client, it must have a reliable date sorting
function.  None of the above-mentioned email clients lack this
capability.

Regards,
Eric


On Thu, 2010-06-17 at 08:54 +0000, Thomas McGuire wrote:
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> This is an automatically generated e-mail. To reply, visit:
> http://reviewboard.kde.org/r/4337/#review6162
> -----------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
> Thanks for coming up with a patch for this for SVN trunk!
> 
> Like Ingo, I'm not sure if using the Received header is the best idea here.
> For sorting by date of arrival, I would suggest simply comparing the item id, since the item id is strictly increasing. This was the way KMail 1 worked as well, it compared the serial number, which is the equivalent of the Akonadi item id.
> 
> Ingo, I don't agree that this feature is not needed. KMail had it earlier, before the new message list was introduced, and now we got some bug reports about this feature missing.
> 
> I wonder what the best UI would be. Before, you could toggle the between sorting by date and sorting by date of arrival simply by clicking on the date header in the view. I think it would be nice to have the same behaviour, in addition to having the new sort mode in the sort mode menu.
> 
> - Thomas
> 
> 
> On 2010-06-16 01:03:47, Eric Sanford wrote:
> > 
> > -----------------------------------------------------------
> > This is an automatically generated e-mail. To reply, visit:
> > http://reviewboard.kde.org/r/4337/
> > -----------------------------------------------------------
> > 
> > (Updated 2010-06-16 01:03:47)
> > 
> > 
> > Review request for KDE PIM and Thomas McGuire.
> > 
> > 
> > Summary
> > -------
> > 
> > KMail should have the ability to extract the date from the Received header field, display the date received and sort by date received. A significant number of emails have incorrect or missing Date header fields. When sorting by Date in KMail, these drop to the bottom as Unknown or appear at the top if the Date header field contains a future date. This is a basic patch to extract the date from the Received header field, add a Date Received column in KMail classic theme, and sort by Date Received in classic theme. This is industry-standard for comparable email applications.
> > 
> > 
> > This addresses bug 227942.
> >     https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=227942
> > 
> > 
> > Diffs
> > -----
> > 
> >   trunk/KDE/kdepim/messagelist/core/item.h 1137450 
> >   trunk/KDE/kdepim/messagelist/core/item.cpp 1137450 
> >   trunk/KDE/kdepim/messagelist/core/item_p.h 1137450 
> >   trunk/KDE/kdepim/messagelist/core/manager.cpp 1137450 
> >   trunk/KDE/kdepim/messagelist/core/model.cpp 1137450 
> >   trunk/KDE/kdepim/messagelist/core/sortorder.h 1137450 
> >   trunk/KDE/kdepim/messagelist/core/sortorder.cpp 1137450 
> >   trunk/KDE/kdepim/messagelist/core/theme.h 1137450 
> >   trunk/KDE/kdepim/messagelist/core/theme.cpp 1137450 
> >   trunk/KDE/kdepim/messagelist/core/themedelegate.cpp 1137450 
> >   trunk/KDE/kdepim/messagelist/core/view.cpp 1137450 
> >   trunk/KDE/kdepim/messagelist/storagemodel.cpp 1137450 
> >   trunk/KDE/kdepim/messagelist/utils/themeeditor.cpp 1137450 
> >   trunk/KDE/kdepim/nepomuk_email_feeder/messageanalyzer.cpp 1137450 
> >   trunk/KDE/kdepimlibs/kmime/kmime_headers.h 1137426 
> >   trunk/KDE/kdepimlibs/kmime/kmime_headers.cpp 1137426 
> >   trunk/KDE/kdepimlibs/kmime/kmime_headers_p.h 1137426 
> >   trunk/KDE/kdepimlibs/kmime/kmime_message.h 1137426 
> >   trunk/KDE/kdepimlibs/kmime/kmime_message.cpp 1137426 
> > 
> > Diff: http://reviewboard.kde.org/r/4337/diff
> > 
> > 
> > Testing
> > -------
> > 
> > This patch has been tested on openSUSE 11.2 and openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 7. The attached patch is currently being tested on openSUSE 11.3 Milestone 7, with KDE executables and libraries built from trunk/KDE (revision 1137426) source code for kdelibs, kdepimlibs, kdebase and kdepim, and trunk/kdesupport source code for attica, soprano, polkit-qt, and akonadi.
> > 
> > 
> > Thanks,
> > 
> > Eric
> > 
> >
> 


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