Multiple view on your emails

Today I faced an interesting problem. You usually have a set of emails in your mailbox. Normally, you start sorting by them by topic, project or whatever, using e.g. a folder system that is provided by your mail client. So in principle, you're building up a certain view on this set of emails after your preferences.

But what if you want another view on your emails? One example would be a per-person view on all emails. And of course, none of the emails shall be copied. Evolution, the Gnome email client, provides a nifty function, so-called "vFolders", to build up alternative views. And today, I discovered that Thunderbird is also able to do that, although it's not quite obvious how to do it. You simply search for somebody, and then you select "Save Search as Folder" in the search field. And that's the vFolder-functionality of Thunderbird. Very nifty, if you know that it exists.

P.S.: in case somebody asks why I don't use mutt-ng at work: it's not a business mailer. I handle emails at work completely different compared to how I handle emails at home.

P.P.S.: I was asked to elaborate a bit on the P.S. statement. Well, mutt-ng is not a business mailer because it doesn't support that kind of views on your emails. I doesn't have such a tight integration with a calendar application as Thunderbird has with Mozilla Calendar (I wrote about this previously). It produces sane emails (so does mutt-ng, of course), and yet it is able to display insane emails sent from people with insane mail clients, which is very important for a business mailer. And it integrates very well into the GUIs of Linux-based desktops, Mac OS X and Windows, something you cannot say from mutt-ng (that spares you a lot of silly questions when non-geek people see you working). On the contrary, mutt-ng is better for my email setup at home, because there, I have to cope with a lot more mailing lists, more spam and a more sophisticated archiving strategy than at work, and I need to be able to do all my work solely via keyboard, which is not a requirement for work.