Yahoo! Mail Blog, UK and Ireland

Sorting it all out

February 20th, 2007

(2 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

 Loading ...

This might seem a little second nature to some of you, but based on some of the feedback we’ve been receiving, I wanted to take a minute to show you how you can quickly and easily sort messages based on a number of different criteria. 7 criteria to be exact.

Use the sort bar
You can use the handy sort bar to group and sort messages quickly and easily. Here’s what it looks like:

All you need to do to sort your messages is to click on the column heading with your mouse button. There are 7 columns to click if you want (which I’ve conveniently put red dots over), and here’s what they do:

1. Attachment – this groups all messages together that have attachments.
2. Read/Unread – this moves all unread emails to the top, and if you click it again, it moves them to the bottom (yes that’s what that ‘i’ means).
3. From – groups and orders alphabetically all your messages by the sender
4. Subject – groups and orders alphabetically by subject line
5. Date – sorts your messages by date (ascending or descending)
6. Size – sorts your messages by how big they are
7. Flag – groups all the messages you’ve flagged for follow up (what that means is for another post)

Ups and Downs, Ins and Outs
I’ve also heard through the grapevine, that sometimes people can’t see all the columns. So if you don’t see all the columns in the image above, you probably need to make a column or two a bit smaller. You can change the size of the “From”, “Subject” and “Date” columns by clicking and dragging the line in between the columns. Move your mouse over the column until it has two arrows then click and drag to resize. Just like this:

That other circle around the downward facing arrow shows you how the column is being sorted. If it’s facing down then it’s descending (that’s most recent to oldest or a to z). Click it once and it will sort ascending.

Andrew – Yahoo! Mail Beta Team

Entry Filed under: grouping, organising, sorting