Sorting messages in Apple Mail, unread first

Hi,
Does anyone know of a way to sort messages in a folder in Apple Mail so that unread messages appear first, and read messages follow (all sorted by date within these two categories)?

Unfortunately, clicking the 'dot' column heading sorts by message status, and Mail considers "replied to", etc, as a separate status. So this method sorts Unread -> Replied to -> Forwarded -> Everything else.

Also, creating a smart mailbox doesn't really solve this issue, because it will only show you unread messages, and it's not really a solution for numerous IMAP folders, I believe.

Essentially, I'm looking for something that mimic's Thunderbird's sort by read/unread column.

For the record, I'm running Mail 3.6 on Leopard.

I've looked for a solution for this everywhere, and I thought I'd finally try asking here. If anyone has any idea for a solution, from plugin to running a script to anything, please let me know! Thanks a lot!

Did u find this area;


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to select by subject, date or To select these boxes and click disclosure triangle to re-arrange top to bottom


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Did you ever figure this out? I've been having this kind of problem since I took my i-Mac out of the box and starting using Mail.

When you sort by 'flags', which I like to do so my action items appear at top of list, it automatically orders 'status' second, so any emails sent as "urgent" permanently reside at the top of the list (below the flags). There seems to be no way to change the sort order or remove the "urgent" status.

Use Smart Mailboxes. Here is a link that I found very helpful: Five Essential Smart Mailboxes For Apple Mail [Mac]