Let the message list be sorted by something other than the date

Newest-first was the only order, so the mail you had not read yet was
wherever it happened to fall.

Seven presets and up to three levels of your own. It covers the Inbox
alone by default: unread-first is what people want in the folder they
triage and confusing in Sent, where everything is read and the order that
matters is when it went. Search keeps newest-first whatever the setting
says, since a result list is already ordered by the question that was
asked.

The server does the sorting, over the whole folder, for the same reason
search runs there: a list sorted in the browser is sorted only as far as
the browser has loaded, which on a folder of ten thousand is the first
fifty and a lie about the rest.

Two details that are easy to get wrong and were worth pinning in tests.
hasKeyword sorts a boolean and false comes before true, so "unread first"
is $seen ASCENDING while "starred first" is $flagged DESCENDING -- the
other way round. Getting either backwards puts exactly the mail you were
looking for at the bottom. And every order ends with newest-first as a
tiebreak, because a sort whose last level is a keyword or a subject leaves
every tie undefined, and an undefined order changes between two looks at
the same folder for no reason the reader can see.

Sorting on a keyword is optional in RFC 8621, and a server that will not
do it fails the whole query rather than degrading it -- so this setting
could turn a folder into one that does not open. The refusal is caught
once, the keyword levels dropped and the query retried, and nothing is
said: the reader asked for an order and got the closest the server can
give, and a toast on every folder change would be the app complaining
about its own request.

The mock now honours the sort instead of always answering newest-first,
which had it reproducing a server that silently returns a different order
from the one asked for -- the one shape of wrongness a client cannot
detect. MOCK_NO_KEYWORD_SORT=1 reproduces a server that refuses the
keyword sorts, so the fallback can be developed against.
This commit is contained in:
2026-09-01 23:51:56 -07:00
parent 6c7c6d19b3
commit 34fc5ab81f
10 changed files with 480 additions and 4 deletions
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import { describe, expect, it } from "vitest";
import { appliesTo, comparatorsFor, isOptionalSort, MAX_LEVELS, withoutOptionalSorts } from "@/lib/listSort";
describe("comparatorsFor, presets", () => {
it("puts newest first by default, and can reverse it", () => {
expect(comparatorsFor("newest")).toEqual([{ property: "receivedAt", isAscending: false }]);
// No tiebreak appended: receivedAt already *is* the tiebreaker, and adding
// a contradictory second one after it would say nothing.
expect(comparatorsFor("oldest")).toEqual([{ property: "receivedAt", isAscending: true }]);
});
it("sorts unread first as $seen ASCENDING, because false sorts before true", () => {
// Getting this backwards puts exactly the mail you were looking for at the
// bottom, which is why it is asserted rather than assumed.
expect(comparatorsFor("unreadFirst")[0]).toEqual({ property: "hasKeyword", keyword: "$seen", isAscending: true });
});
it("sorts starred first as $flagged DESCENDING, which is the other way round", () => {
expect(comparatorsFor("starredFirst")[0]).toEqual({ property: "hasKeyword", keyword: "$flagged", isAscending: false });
});
it("handles the plain field presets", () => {
expect(comparatorsFor("largest")[0]).toEqual({ property: "size", isAscending: false });
expect(comparatorsFor("sender")[0]).toEqual({ property: "from", isAscending: true });
expect(comparatorsFor("subject")[0]).toEqual({ property: "subject", isAscending: true });
});
it("falls back to newest for a preset it does not know", () => {
expect(comparatorsFor("nonsense" as never)).toEqual([{ property: "receivedAt", isAscending: false }]);
});
});
describe("comparatorsFor, the tiebreak", () => {
it("always ends newest-first, so a tie does not shuffle between loads", () => {
for (const p of ["unreadFirst", "starredFirst", "largest", "sender", "subject"] as const) {
const out = comparatorsFor(p);
expect(out[out.length - 1]).toEqual({ property: "receivedAt", isAscending: false });
}
});
it("does not add a second one when the sort already ends on receivedAt", () => {
expect(comparatorsFor("newest")).toHaveLength(1);
expect(comparatorsFor("oldest")).toHaveLength(1);
expect(comparatorsFor("custom", [{ field: "date", descending: false }])).toHaveLength(1);
});
});
describe("comparatorsFor, custom levels", () => {
it("keeps the levels in the order given", () => {
const out = comparatorsFor("custom", [
{ field: "starred", descending: true },
{ field: "unread", descending: true },
]);
expect(out).toEqual([
{ property: "hasKeyword", keyword: "$flagged", isAscending: false },
{ property: "hasKeyword", keyword: "$seen", isAscending: true },
{ property: "receivedAt", isAscending: false },
]);
});
it("takes at most three, since past that nobody can predict the result", () => {
const out = comparatorsFor("custom", [
{ field: "starred", descending: true },
{ field: "unread", descending: true },
{ field: "from", descending: false },
{ field: "size", descending: true },
]);
expect(out.filter((c) => c.property === "size")).toEqual([]);
expect(out).toHaveLength(MAX_LEVELS + 1); // three levels plus the tiebreak
});
it("drops a field repeated at two levels, which can only be a mistake", () => {
const out = comparatorsFor("custom", [
{ field: "from", descending: false },
{ field: "from", descending: true },
]);
expect(out).toEqual([
{ property: "from", isAscending: true },
{ property: "receivedAt", isAscending: false },
]);
});
it("falls back to the tiebreak alone when no levels were given", () => {
expect(comparatorsFor("custom", [])).toEqual([{ property: "receivedAt", isAscending: false }]);
});
it("reverses a date level without losing the tiebreak", () => {
const out = comparatorsFor("custom", [{ field: "sent", descending: false }]);
expect(out).toEqual([
{ property: "sentAt", isAscending: true },
{ property: "receivedAt", isAscending: false },
]);
});
});
describe("optional sorts, which a server is allowed to refuse", () => {
it("recognises the keyword properties", () => {
expect(isOptionalSort({ property: "hasKeyword", keyword: "$seen" })).toBe(true);
expect(isOptionalSort({ property: "someInThreadHaveKeyword", keyword: "$flagged" })).toBe(true);
expect(isOptionalSort({ property: "receivedAt" })).toBe(false);
expect(isOptionalSort({ property: "size" })).toBe(false);
});
it("strips them, leaving something the server must accept", () => {
const out = withoutOptionalSorts(comparatorsFor("custom", [
{ field: "unread", descending: true },
{ field: "size", descending: true },
]));
expect(out).toEqual([
{ property: "size", isAscending: false },
{ property: "receivedAt", isAscending: false },
]);
});
it("still ends on the tiebreak when stripping removed everything else", () => {
expect(withoutOptionalSorts(comparatorsFor("unreadFirst"))).toEqual([{ property: "receivedAt", isAscending: false }]);
});
it("leaves a sort that was never optional alone", () => {
const plain = comparatorsFor("largest");
expect(withoutOptionalSorts(plain)).toEqual(plain);
});
});
describe("appliesTo", () => {
it("covers only the inbox on the narrow scope", () => {
// Unread-first is what people want where they triage, and confusing in
// Sent, where everything is read.
expect(appliesTo("inbox", "inbox")).toBe(true);
expect(appliesTo("inbox", "sent")).toBe(false);
expect(appliesTo("inbox", null)).toBe(false);
});
it("covers everything on the wide one", () => {
expect(appliesTo("all", "sent")).toBe(true);
expect(appliesTo("all", null)).toBe(true);
});
});