I figured out a workable solution, using Thunderbird tags. 1. Customize Thunderbird toolbar and "View" button/menu to your toolbar. This reveals some hidden fu

I figured out a workable solution, using Thunderbird tags. 1. Customize Thunderbird toolbar and "View" button/menu to your toolbar. This reveals some hidden functionality that I discovered by accident just now. 2. Go to your Inbox folder and Tag some messages as "To Do" (default shortcut "4"), and then archive them. 3. Go to the Archive folder and from the "View" menu select Tags->To Do. This will display all "To Do" emails in the folder. 4. Under the same "View" menu, select, "Save view as folder" option. Select appropriate settings on the popup window and create your shortcut. 5. Now you have a shortcut folder in your folderpane that displays your ToDo items. At this point, you can revert step 1, as the toolbar button is not needed. Now, if I can't deal with a message before the end of the workday, I can do "4 A" on the message to make it disappear from my inbox, while still keeping it handy. The only downside of this system is that I need to select "Archives" folder to update my local copy of the folder. Otherwise, newly ToDo-ed emails won't show up under the shortcut.