Mail 2.0: Column sort order in search results affects sort order in main message list

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Mail
August 4th, 2005 • 11:28 am

This is another one of those small, yet significant irritants in Mac OS X’s Mail 2.0.

I normally keep my Inbox sorted chronologically in ascending order, meaning that the oldest messages are at the top and the newest ones are at the very bottom. In other words, the column used for sorting my messages is the “Date Received” column, and it is selected with the triangle pointing up (indicating ascending order).

If I then do a search in Mail using the search field, by the default the search results are sorted by “Rank“, which is a special column that only appears when Mail lists search results. By default, the results are sorted in descending order, with the one with the highest rank at the top of the window.

If I then click on the “Date” column to sort results by date instead of rank, the results are sorted chronologically in descending order, with the most recent at the top.

And then if I click on the “x” button in the search field to cancel the search and return to my Inbox, my Inbox now lists messages chronologically, but in descending order!

This is absurd, because the order that I want for the search results has nothing to do with the order that I want for my Inbox. One shouldn’t affect the other! Yet it does… 


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