the subfolder thing helps for reading it when it comes in, it doesn't help with the searching later on... Have you tried it? How often does that really happen? I'm pretty sure yahoo mail does the same thing because every now and then I get new mail that shows up really far down my inbox. Most of the time that it happens, it's spam. In fact... every time it has happened so far it has been spam.

As for OE, how exactly do you plan to work around the security problems? It's the most insecure client available. some retarded percent of viruses (somewhere around 75% I think) are written to exploit vulnerabilities in it. It's a POS. Seriously, you should check your e-mail by telnetting into the pop server before you even consider OE. It's that bad.