Here’s a good tip from the Indev Support Forum:

If you set your sow recent folders to “0” you will get the behaviour you want. The space tels the system to not interpret what you are typing as a quick key for the recent items. if you have no recent items, no neet for the spacebar.

Now, having assigned ‘move messages’ to a press of the ‘V’ key, moving messages with MailActOn works even better than in Gmail (as Gmail uses a “starts with” search for the folder/label name, whereas MailActOn searches for a substring).

Backstory

I started out my re-booted e-mail workflow using MailMate. It’s really powerful and fast and it is great when sorting and organizing email. However, I have to say that I prefer Apple Mail when reading e-mail, the layout is that much better: one line preview of e-mail in widescreen layout + simpler view of the conversation (which Apple Mail is better at identifying too).

Together with Apple Mail, I am using MailTags, MailActOn. I also have MailPerspectives installed, but find that at the moment, I prefer having e-mail as a “main” task, rather than something that I do inbetween, or in the middle of other tasks.