I'm looking for a bit of Mail.app-fu to solve this annoyance. I have a MailTag called "following," that I use to mark threads from high-volume lists that I care about. It saves me a TON of time, since I have a couple of Smart Folders that let me quickly find these.

The problem is that when I look in these folders, I only see the particular message I tagged, when it would be more useful to see the whole thread. My first thought was to try an applescript, but Mail's scripting dictionary doesn't know about threads. Does anyone have a way to either 1) quickly find all messages that are in the same thread as the selected or 2) go from a message in a smart folder to a view of the message in its actual folder location?

Of course, if there is a totally different way to solve the problem, I'd be interested in hearing that too.