[ChrisMarshallNY]

It could also be someone "practicing good time management."

They have a specific time of day, when they check their email, and they only give 30 minutes to that time, and they check emails from most recent, down.

The email comes in, two hours earlier, and, by the time they check their email, it's been buried under 50 spams, and near-spams; each of which needs to be checked, so they run out of 30 minutes, before they get to it. The next day, by email check time, another 400 spams have been thrown on top.

Think I'm kidding?

Many folks that have worked for large companies (or bureaucracies) have seen exactly this.

[eru]

The system would be mostly sane, if you could sort by some measure of importance, not just recency.