| This ended up being quite wordy and I'm still not sure I explained my issue properly. I might need to do a visual mockup of my problem which boils down to "mental disconnect between the source of the data and where you view the data". I want all Children Folder contents to be visible from a Parent Folder. Actions would still be done to the Child folder the email actually exists inside of - the Parent folder is for presentation purposes only. This is basically how a Search Folder works currently. Currently if I open up a normal `Parent` folder I will see 0 emails. If I want to see any mail I need to visit a `Parent/Child` folder that the mail is filtered into. But what I really want, sometimes, is to see all of my `Parent/Child` emails in a single, flat view. Folders are great for organizing the past but are really bad for the "now". To build off my earlier example (re: one distro = five problems) I want to keep these five problems filtered into their own folders for easier organization/finding when other people reference them. However, since I need to solve these problems as they are emailed in I want to watch a `Parent` folder. I can't do this because the `Parent` folder says it has no emails. I can only see email if I look at a `Parent/Child` folder, but now I can't see any email going to the other four `Parent/Child` folders. While watching the `Parent` folder I can see that `Parent/Child` has new unread emails - but now I'm forced to change my folder location panel to the Child folder in order to view and read this unread email. This is different from how a Search Folder works. In a Search Folder, I can continue to see all searched emails while browsing one in the reading panel. I can see all of them at once by creating a 'Search' folder that searches each `Parent/Child` and displays the result of its search but why can't that Search Folder just be `Parent`? Why does it need to be `/Search Folders/Distro Trasks/`? If `/Parent/` was a search folder that could exist anywhere in the folder tree and works exactly like search folders currently work that'd be perfect. The TL;DR of the entire problem is that `Parent` should just act like a Search Folder of it's Children instead of being completely useless. I don't want a flat structure - due to organizational/archiving purposes - but I do want a flat structure some of the time for handling email in the present time. >Portrait mode, OK. Many email clients do give some few options for various horizontal/vertical splits. Are the options in Outlook enough in that respect? Yes. Existing options that many clients use where the navigation panel and the reading panel are horizontally split instead of vertically split suffice. |
I seem to remember Thunderbird having saved searches that worked as folders, and they should work in this manner. Does Outlook have a way to save a search like that? It's not ideal, as you have to set it up and it isn't necessarily in the same spot as what it's searching to make it obvious what it is, but it might be better than nothing. If you can't set subfolder display order, creating a saved search of all the relevant subfolders as "0 - Combined View" as a subfolder itself that sorts to the top might get you most the way there.