I wish there is mailing to group feature

No. But I'd settle for being able to assign a contact to a particular group.

 

I wish I could add any sender to VIP instead of an existing contact

 

You can. Click on the sender and add to VIP.

 

That adds the sender to your contacts. I don't want that.

 

Once you click on the sender in an email, there's an option to add the email address of the sender to the VIP list, which is the only thing it does (without adding or updating any contacts). I do that quite often (while only having just a few of the VIP email addresses in any of my actual contacts).

 

great thanks I did not know that.

Bleh: how do I actually make it populate the VIP folder now? I added all these folks.

 

I believe it might take a bit of time for it to scan through the existing emails and make the appropriate ones appear there.

 

Found this in another thread on MR

The VIP Folder will only display emails from the Inbox. If you have mail in other folders, they do not get indexed. This greatly limits the VIP functionality for me, as I have some Rules that move email from certain people to specified folders. All the VIP alerts still work, you just can't use the VIP folder so see any emails outside the Inbox.

Makes it pretty much useless to me as I keep folders for each corporate client I support.

 

Ah, yes, there's that limitation unfortunately. I keep on forgetting about it as I often/mainly use VIP just for "filtered" notification purposes.