Comment 77 for bug 115153

(In reply to comment #42)

> A simple fix might be to use a sort type of "Date" instead of "Order Received"
> when the user displays messages by thread.

As it was mentioned before, the drawback of this fix is that "Order Received" always works while "Date" depends on the sender having a correctly set up system clock. Spam, for example, sometimes has weird dates (not necessarily because they try to achieve something; more often than not, the zombie machine simply doesn't synchronize its clock because the owner doesn't care).

It's not a big deal since there are three kinds of bad clocks: Near the epoch (1.1.1970), around 2036 and around the current time (with an offset of a few hours because the system clock gets out of sync). So if you look at the newest mail, you get most of the mail with broken dates and you only have to check the other end of the queue once in a while to get them all.

That being said, I still can't understand why "Date" works while "Order Received" is impossible to fix. It's not as if the whole algorithm has to be implemented from scratch again. It's just a different header field that has to be used in an existing sort algorithm.

So when I saw this bug, I was sure it would be fixed as a minor issue in the next release. But instead, this bug is now four (*4*) years old!

Please see bug 426161 where I ask for a change in the development process to make sure that bugs don't get lost.