For Conversation view, we currently have columns available for Received and Sent dates, but it would be great to get a column which shows you the date and time of the last message in the conversation.
So if the last message was one sent by you, it would show that Sent date (and time). If the last message was sent by someone else, it would show that Received date (and time).
This would be easier to use to quickly know where a conversation is at, than comparing Received and Sent times, and would be particularly useful when performing searches for e-mails.
It would also really help when Sorting e-mails in Conversation view, as, currently, you have to pick between Received or Sent for sorting, which can lead to e-mails being displayed in a funny order.
To add to this, it’s currently impossible to consistently display the correct last sender’s avatar and name in the Conversation top line, because the only ways to sort by email order are with “Received” and “Sent”.
If you set the sort order as “Received”, because you want the newest e-mails you receive to show first (which is normal), then if you sent the last e-mail in a thread, it won’t show you as the sender for the avatar or the first name.
The only way around this would be to have a new column for “date and time”, which would apply to any sent or received e-mail, which you could then sort by.
This would then allow the last sender of an e-mail in a conversation to be the first avatar and first name.
Just adding another use-case to this.
If you reply to an e-mail thread and then delete the whole thread, it moves to your deleted folder correctly.
If you have your deleted folder set to sort by date Received, then this deleted email appears quite far down the list, as you need to sort by Sent to show it up top.
This is a problem because:
- If you come back to your deleted folder at a later date to look for said e-mail chain, and forget you sent the last email, you might be looking for this e-mail and cannot find it, forgetting you sent the last email, so you need to sort by sent.
- It is slow, because it’s not intuitive. - Intuitively, you just want to go to your deleted folder and see the latest item up top.
- Most other email systems sort by the date of the last message, so it works differently than most other systems out there.
If we had the ability to sort by the last e-mail date, instead of just Received or Sent, it would mean the latest e-mail is always at the top.
This would obviously be really useful.