Reverse order of email thread folding in Evolution

emailevolution

By default Evolution groups emails by thread in a tree-like structure. The first email is the root, the responses to it are its children, etc.

Here is a screenshot from wikipedia:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ed/Evolution_36_mail.png

I find it more comfortable to have the emails in a thread sorted by date with the newest one being the first. In the example screenshot this will mean reversing the order of the messages. I have seen this in other mail clients. Is there a way to do this in Evolution?

Best Answer

This is an old question, but I've just figured this out myself and could not find any information on this in Evolution's documentation.

In order to have the emails in a thread sorted by date (descending) you can set the sort order of the mail list view to date (descending) and run the following command.

gsettings set org.gnome.evolution.mail thread-children-ascending false

This setting will sort thread children using the same sort order as configured for the thread root level instead of always sorting them ascending.

From the gsettings description:

$ gsettings describe org.gnome.evolution.mail thread-children-ascending
This setting specifies whether the thread children should be sorted always ascending, rather 
than using the same sort order as in the thread root level.
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