[OT] Thunderbird thread/date sorting?

[Nick Sabalausky]

As is typical with Mozilla's endless stream of crapware, Thunderbird 
requires a boatload of hacks before it's halfway usable. But there's one 
thing I still can't figure out how to fix. Unfortunately though, 
Mozilla's support system is a useless black hole where questions just go 
to die (Seems to be true of *any* system that uses "Get Satisfaction"). 
I know a bunch of people here use Thunderbird, so I'm hoping someone 
here might know:

Any idea how to get Thunderbird to sort threads by date of the *first* 
message in the thread?

After a ton of searching, it appears that using "Order received" is a 
non-solution as it often doesn't actually do what the name implies. But 
I can't seem to find a real solution.