There's no sorting in Gmail? Really?

Use the "Show search options" link and pick a date range. Closest thing to what you're after. I actually like it a little more than sorting by date as if gives you a smaller range of emails to look over.

Perhaps a Greasemonkey script can help you? GMail doesn't support sorting by itself. A quick search gave me the following link, and the Saved Searches may help you:
http://code.google.com/p/gmail-greasemonkey/

- Johan

I posted 5 missing features from GMail over at my work blog recently , and 40 other people added theirs. Sorting was listed alright, but you'd be surprised what else is missing...
http://www.iqcontent.com/blog

Not really, but check out the "Show Search Options" link, which lets you restrict by date, then the mail you want will be at the top.

If you are looking for email from (or to) a specific person, just search based on that.

A search feature is definitely helpful. But sorting has other advantages that search doesn't... like being able to see groupings of e-mails at a click, *without* searching for every single name or date range.

Isn't Gmail already sorted by date? I mean, it puts newest messages on top... so isn't that sorting by date?

If you want to look at older e-mails, you just use the "Older" and "Oldest" links. I feel like I'm totally missing what the problem is...

Sorting implies being able to control the direction of the sort. Why can't we put oldest on top?

And what about sorting by sender, or subject?

I'm guessing the reason is that the Gmail team is focusing on the 80% of features that will get the most use. If you didn't miss this particular feature for several months, what does that say about how important it is?

Sorting by sender is only useful if you're looking for mail from someone specific -- so just search for their name and voila!

I can't imagine a use case for sorting by subject in Gmail. In Outlook and the like, sorting by subject is useful for seeing all the e-mails sent on a particular topic. Gmail already groups these for you automatically. If you're interested in something more general than a particular subject line, then do a search and you'll get better results than trying to sort through irrelevant, but alphabetically similar subjects.

Of course I'm overgeneralizing here without any actual facts, so if you have use cases for sorting by name and subject that are not better handled by Gmail's search capabilities, I'd love to hear them.

One thing to also note, Gmail still uses paging. Even if you could sort, you would be required to scroll through the list in 50-100 message chunks. I imagine with new capabilities in local storage (Google Gears) they will be able to overcome this. Our team at IBM has already prototyped a web2.0 mail client that allows you to sort, filter, and pivot on a 10K+ message inbox with response time comparable to rich clients. We have an upcoming paper at UIST2007 about this.

If you import old mail into Gmail via the POP3 functionality, it'll correctly sort the mail by date. This can have interesting side effects when you're importing mail from 2003 -- it all goes to the last page of your mailbox, rather than the first.

It seems like Gmail is sorting by some sort of magical "arrived" date, and only for POP3 mail does it set the "arrived" date to match the date of the message.

I am a graphic designer and I use Gmail exclusively. I use it to send images and files from one computer to the next. One option that I really miss is the ability to sort by size. I would love to be able to find all of those massivly huge emails bogged down with forgotten attachments and delete them. I have intentions of cleaning out my email, but just haven't gotten to it yet. Being able to delete the largest emails first always gives you that satisfying feeling of seeing your percentage drop very quickly.

Maybe if you allow us to sort on GooToDo, Google will notice and update it's functionality as well...

;-)

You haven't seen that you can sort by priority (via the arrows to the right of todos)?

Yes, I've seen that, and I use it. But the forced/manual sort a lot of work when there are natural system-provided sorts, such as alphabetical or date received or...

But the point of this discussion is gmail, so I'll shut up now.

I agree... Gmail SHOULD allow us to sort by subject, sender, date, size, attachments etc.

Isn't Gmail already sorted by date? I mean, it puts newest messages on top... so isn't that sorting by date?

If you want to look at older e-mails, you just use the "Older" and "Oldest" links. I feel like I'm totally missing what the problem is...

Say you've been away from your mail for a week or two. You want to read your mail from the time you left until the time you got back, not the latest messages first. Tjhreading doesn't solve this because people often change the title of subjects slightly, or you get digests that have different titles. It would be nice in this situation if you could sort Gmail so you could naturally read mail in the order it arrived rather than the latest message first.