[MlMt] Smart Mailboxes vs. Filters

[Gary Hull]

MailMate has smart mailboxes. Gmail has filters. For all I know there 
may be mail clients with both. Essentially they are the same thing. A 
filter looks at an incoming message and does something to it. If that 
something involves putting it into a particular (virtual) mailbox, then 
it's the same as a smart mailbox.

But conceptually I'm bothered by having just smart mailboxes for 
situations where I want to just send messages to the trash. It bugs me 
that I have to have a mailbox for it, even though I can tuck that 
mailbox away in a folder. The Gmail way of having a list of filters 
seems cleaner to me for send-to-trash situations. Having a smart mailbox 
that exists only to show stuff that you don't want to see grates on me.

But I do like the MailMate/Mail.app way for when I want to 
collect/isolate particular classes of messages in one handy place.