Thanks, Rick. I wasn't clear enough, I think. I set up a Cases Folder in the root and a client folder under it using the General "tab" in the folder properties. But under the Additional tab, there is a place to enter a directory outside of the default mail store. That is what I am playing around with. It appears it would let me store the actual messages file for a client in a directory elsewhere on my computer where I might have non-email files like letters, pdfs etc. In fact, when I go look at C:\Users\Chris\AppData\Roaming\The Bat!\Mail\Cases, there is no directory with my client's name. That directory is located where I put in in say Z:\OpenCases\Wanda J. Client. I am just wondering if that is going to lead to any functional problems with the software down the road. It seems like a great feature to me.
If I understand what is happening, it looks like my filter is moving all of that client's messages from the inboxes to this mail message file in the separate directory, but they appear in the real (nonvirtual) folder that I created in The Bat! I think I understand that I could leave all the messages in an inbox or some other folder and then use virtual folders to view each client's messages separately. But my goal is to get the messages into a place with the client's other files so I can archive them together easily when I finish their case. Also, the reason I am ditching Thunderbird is that it is either choking on all the filters I have created or it does not like how big my files are getting or it is fighting with my indexing program. It just slows to a crawl until I restart in safemode or wait a long time. So my thought is to also keep especially the inboxes emptied out so those files don't get so big and take so long to scan every time i download new messages.