I like to work with my messages sorted by the "Status" column. This allows me to look over the apparent good messages with a critical eye to find bad ones, and the Known Spam with a bias to find false positives. The problem I have now is that when I sort by Status, I get what "seems" to be a list in order of "badness", but with inconsistencies. For example, I have filters that mark messages as Legitimate or Spam, based on various criteria - but those filters sort "in between" the others so that sometimes a single "Keep" message is overlooked between Blacklisted by SpamCop and Known Spam. I end up sweeping it up along with those two categories and reporting it to SpamCop. This really seems to irritate them, if it happens to be a response from an ISP to one of their Spam reports. I'd like to make all Legitimate messages sort together - Friends, Possibly Legitimate, Keep (one of my filters), SpamCop Replies (another of my filters), etc. and all bad messages sort together - Possibly Spam, Probably Spam, Blacklisted by..., Not to Me (another of my filters), Known Spam, etc. I don't think there's a way to do this by naming my filters in some alphabetic fashion (even if I could find names that made sense that way). The sorting by Staus doesn't seem to be based on alphabet - unless there's a hidden status name that is being used rather than the displayed text.

I start all my filter "status" fields with an X for spam and an A for legitimate and that seems to keep the filtered stuff together.

Not sure how that would work on the version you are using.

I do similarly with "a" in front of definitely legit and "z" in front of definitely spam. The problem is that FirstAlert overrides your own filters and prevents sorting by filter name. I ended up shutting it off for that reason.

I tried modifying the filter names but I find that my filtered "good" sorts above the RBL spam. I'm also frustrated not to be able to mark a message as Legitimate and also mark it for deletion (seems reasonable to me - it's a good message, I see it, but I don't need to download it to my mail client).

I think my suggestion for improvements to the sort by Status stands - I can't find a way to sort all my good messages together when I sort by Status.

That isn't a new suggestion it has been made many times by many people with no changes forthcoming. Since as users we can't force changes on firetrust all we can offer is workarounds.