Technical Tip: FortiMail Webmail sorting behavior

This article describes the webmail sorting behavior on FortiMail.

FortiMail.

On occasions, it may be noticed that the emails on FortiMail are not being sorted according to the date displayed on the email header.

The reason is because FortiMail sorts the email based on the date/time the email is moved into FortiMail therefore, if the email is being migrated to FortiMail, the emails will be sorted based on 'received date' instead of the 'header date'.

For the behavior of email clients, the dates can be sorted locally by the email application (Eg. Outlook/Thunderbird), if emails sorted  by 'Order Received', the same list as shown on FortiMail webmail will be visible.

For Fortimail webmail, sorting email based on 'header date' is not efficient and can introduce performance penalties as FortiMail will need to look into each email header files to identify the 'header date', which is why sorting email by 'header date' is not being performed on FortiMail.