I'm not the grandparent poster, but I'm not sure if this is what they had in mind by "filtering rules". When I read the comment, I immediately thought of how I use procmail for live sorting of incoming mail, but I also occasionally pull out al(pine) for various manual sorting/rearranging tasks. I've always found its "broaden/narrow selection + zoom" tools to be pretty powerful. (Maybe mutt has tools of similar capability; I don't know.)
Not exactly the same, but in mutt, there is a simple language which you can use to refer to a subset of the messages in your view. E.g. "~U" will match you unread messages, etc.
You can group tag messages on mutt with any pattern you'd like and then move them. Or, you can limit your view to what you want to move, select some and then move them.
