Sorting improvement in newer Thunderbird release?

After using OE for mai and news (yes, OE can be used for posting
correctly with some additional utility) for years I switched to
Thunderbird around 2 years ago. The main reason was that OE data backup
is simply terrible, with TB I just can backup the data folder and have
everything I need.

However, there are several things in newsgroup handling that really
annoy me, and when searching newsgroups and forums I also found that I'm
not the only one who is annoyed. My main critics are:

- Messages sorted as threaded by reference (TB can show messages
threaded but if set to sort by date then it sorts them for the date of
the oldest/latest message and not the oldest/latest reference message.
As a result the order of thread gets mixed as soon as a new message is
downloaded).
- Thread expansion: OE could be set to show all threads expanded by
default. With TB I always have to expand threads manually, and even if I
expanded all threads in a newsgroup new threads will be shown collapsed.
There should be an option that allows setting to show all threads
expanded by default.
- Alphabetical newsgroup listing: in OE subscribed newsgroups are listed
alphabetically. TB lists groups in the order they are subscribed to.
When using lots of groups this is really annoying. There should be an
option to sort them alphabetically.
- X-posted messages: in OE, if you read a message that was x-posted in
several groups in one group it would show as "read" in other groups. In
TB the same message gets "read" in the group you read it but is still
marked as "unread" in all other groups.
- Search field in newsgroup subscribe window can only use one keyword
(in OE you can use multiple keywords).
- Search function: in OE I could search news messages for a keyword in a
way where after pressing a button I could jump to the next message that
contains the keyword. In TB searching always hides messages that don't
fit the search, just jumping to the next fitting message while having
all messages listed is not possible.
- And why the hell is "answer to newsgroup" not the first item in the
context menu when right-clicking on a newsgroup posting but has to be
third (after "open in new window" and "reply to sender")? Even after two
years it often happens that I mistakenly send a message to the sender
instead of to the group. The most logical way would be that "answer to
newsgroup" is the first item when using news.

What I would like to know is if these (or at least some) of these issues
will be addressed in a upcoming Thunderbird release (TB 2?).
Thunderbird is a really nice program but these things are really
annoying and IMHO should not be present any more.

Another issue I have with Thunderbird is that it's slow like hell. I
attend to around 90 newsgroups and have lots of mail. Sometimes when
clicking of another newsgroup or just another posting TB just does
nothing for up 10s. After that it often happens that TB minimizes
itself. My system: HP xw9300 2x XEON 3.6GHz, 13GB DDR2 ECC, 3x 250GB
SATA as RAID0 on a Promise SX4300 PCI-X SATA RAID controller, Windowsxp
Pro x64 with latest updates). This has happend with all TB releases I've
been using, it's also doing that on my notebook. And no, it's neither a
worm/virus or a antivirus program or any other application that is
causing this.

Benjamin

Benjamin Gawert