email is backwards

eventually, email will go the way of threads (a la gmail). but email has been in the mainstream for well over a decade and yet still no one has figured out that new email should be sorted in reverse chronological order.

life for 99% of the white collar world begins something like this. power on your computer, walk to the kitchenette for a cup of coffee, sit down in your herman miller aeron chair and gently blow on your steaming beverage while you scroll through the mountain of email that has accumulated in the last 16 hours.

and herein lies the problem. often there's a series of emails that you need to read from the beginning in order to understand the discussion. that means you begin with the oldest one first. and everytime you delete a message you've read the cursor moves to the next oldest email meaning you need to scroll upwards to get to the next message to be read.

here are my two proposals:

1) keep sorting messages from newest to oldest, but make the default starting point for the cursor the oldest unread email. then, when deleting a message the cursor scrolls upward by one.

2) sort messages from oldest to newest and make the default starting point for the cursor the oldest unread email and cursor still moves downward by one when a message is deleted.

voila, a whole lot less arrow key clicking each morning.