Last weekend I started noticing that I could not sort my Hotmail inbox messages for my primary email account. I would go into a message, come back to the inbox and now I would be able to sort them by date. After selecting to do so, the page would refresh but the messages would not be sorted and the link to execute the sort function would not be available anymore.

This was around the same time that MS shut down their IM service for maintenance so I thought it was part of the same development process or at least something related. Given the fact that it is only a personal preference and not something that limits the use of my account I decided to ignore it for the time being.

However, today it’s more than just an inconvenience and any efforts to communicate with Microsoft have been futile. I decided to use a second email address that I have with Hotmail just to see if I could replicate the problem. Using the exact same browser, I logged into my second email account and to my surprise, the sort functionality was there. I was able to sort any folder I choose without any glitches.

According to the instructions provided by the Hotmail help section:

You can control the date order in which your messages are displayed in your Inbox or other folders.

1. Go to the Mail page.
2. On the left side of the page, click the folder you want to sort.
3. Click Date to sort your messages by the date they were received.

However, in my case, I cannot click on the "Date" field. I have searched all of my Hotmail options and even Google was not able to help. Do you have any ideas? Are you experiencing the same thing with your account?

update: after a more detail search, it appears that I am not the only one seeing this problem and it is related to the 250MB accounts.

update II: I received a reply to my message to Microsoft with regards to this issue. I am not sure if all "upgraded" accounts can sort their messages but at least I am able to do so. Here is part of the message I received from MS.

I understand your concern regarding the Sort feature in your Hotmail account.

I would like to inform you that in order to support larger Inbox as 2000MB / 250MB, some User Interface changes were required.

…
Sincerely,
Chris
MSN Hotmail Technical Support Representative

Properly working inbox

My unsortable inbox