You are baffled why it is not simple to tum on. a thread starts with an original email. the next in the thread is an email that references the original email in the references header. Regardless of the complexity of the replies to headers and the references headers each email in a thread has a parent that came before it. Now you are trying to reverse the logic of the thread and start with the last entry and somehow work backwards. Certainly not a trivial thing as the thread may have any number of children in many branches, but only one root.

The closest analogy is a tree. We start with the trunk and the thread branches out in any number of ways to the individual leaves. Your asking to pick a leaf and somehow recreate the tree down to the trunk, including the other branches as a thread is not a simple chain.

The following image is a simple thread. As you can see the latest two replies to this thread are on different sub threads, how would you suggest that grouping be sorted in your view of things with the latest mail shown first.

To clarify slightly my original post I am "baffled" that there isn't a simple way in the UI to be able to turn this option on or off. I did not say that the problem itself was necessarily trivial to solve.

In the scenario you give above I wouldn't allow having multiple levels of nested threads in the first place since that's only going to get you in trouble. There is only thread level under the chevron you clicked to open this thread. Now follow me for just a minute and let me try to explain the logic here and we are going to borrow some ideas from Office 365 but bear with me.

Now lets assume only one thread level in this let's just call it a conversation. So instead of a tree where every time you get a reply another leaf is added to the end of the branch, following this analogy, you instead think of this conversation as a time line. We know the date/time when we received the original, root, email. Now based on that time anything that comes into this conversation that is a later time goes above the original email in the thread. Following this logic even if you have that one annoying person who replied to an older part of the thread with his latest response we don't have to care and we still place that at the top of the thread, since it will explicitly be the latest date/time, and we are still in good shape.

Also anything that I send to this conversation should show as sent in the conversation, though I am sure some may fight me on this, since that way I don't have to dig through the UI and head to the sent folder and reply-all to it to try and keep the conversation as clean as possible. This part is actually mostly possible in Thunderbird, TB, as it stands today.

Okay now one of the next obvious questions is "Okay Shickmo since your such a smarty pants and have this all figured out what should we show in the UI as far as the date and time go as we get new conversations, we should just show the date and time of the original email right? Wrong, we very much should not do that and let me pose an alternative to this. Instead we should show the date and time of the latest message in the thread.

The only exception to this should be in the scenario I gave you with my sent message showing in the conversation and its the most recent message in the conversation in which case we should default to showing the latest message that we didn't send for the date/time shown on the chevron line of the conversation.

The above logic I am posing here is how Office 365, their web access version, handles the situation and Outlook is very similar if not the same.

Let me reiterate that if Thunderbird is going to continue to function and grow with the modern world this is functionality that users would opt to use if available.

To bring all of this back home to the original ask I am trying to find a way to accomplish viewing my emails in TB in a conversation where the latest emails show first and chronologically get older till reaching the original email. Thanks in advance to anyone who knows how to accomplish this task.

If someone can definitively tell me this can't be done I would accept that as well and pose my thoughts in another more appropriate forum.

Sincerely,

Shickmo

The threaded view of a conversation preserves the logical links between messages. If you want to see them in a pure chronological order then it is no longer a conversation. You'll have replies to different questions just lumped together in the order they were uttered, but each dissociated from the message to which it replies.

How are you to going to forbid "having multiple levels of nested threads"?

It is no longer a conversation.

I feel like we are getting a bit pedantic over the words conversation and thread here since both could be defined in totally different ways. Let's try some visual aides. Now I am not saying this is exactly the way it would function but this is how, for example this idea is used in Office 365.

You can see in the first darker image there is a flow from the latest message to the oldest message. The lighter image shows what it would look like in the message pane. There isn't any loss in what is going on at all. Now this is a ridiculously simple example but the point remains I now have the latest email at the top of the list I don't have to scroll through my messages to find it and it's immediately apparent that the top message is the latest.

I guess I am confused how this has negatively impacted the logical links here.

I guess I am also confused why no one has actually answered the question yet of can I currently configure Thunderbird to show the most recent emails at the top of a, insert pedantic word here for a group of emails discussing the same topic, with or without needing some kind of add-on.

But that is a trivial linear thread, scarcely worthy of the label "conversation".

You could try this:

Select a message. Right-click, select "View in conversation". The selected message and related messages will appear listed in a new window.

Deselect threaded view, sort by date in whatever order you want it. I never understand how "ascending" and "descending" are supposed to be parsed. You can select/deselect threading and sort by date by clicking on the column headings. A second click toggles the selection or sorting order.

The success of this "view in conversation" approach depends on how messages are logically related to each other. In some environments, messages which logically ought to flow into one another appear to have no recognition of the other messages' existence, so they don't appear in the conversation view.

But it is so easy to find unread messages that I don't place any great importance on the sorting. In many of the places I visit, bottom-posting is the norm, so it's natural to sort messages by oldest first, to be consistent with the oldest-first structure of the message contents, following the nature of bottom-posting. I don't think I'd stay long in an environment that had the restriction you posit. I want to be able to reply to any point made, particularly when a thread has drifted off-topic and I'd prefer to reply to an earlier valid point, rather than getting tangled with the inevitable trolling and sniping added later.

And if I stumble over a thread I haven't seen before then naturally I expect to be able to read it from top to bottom in chronological order. Just as we do on this forum.