How do I find emails easily in Apple Mail?

Question

I miss Eudora. I save all my emails because I often have to go back and find old messages.  I find it impossible to find anything in Apple's mail program though.  Is there anyway I can make it work more logically?
For instance I just wanted to find the last email I got from someone named Aaron. 
In eudora I would just type aa, and it would go to the last email I got from someone who's name started with aa.   What does mail do?  it goes to an email with africa bambaata in the subject line.  Then I try aar, then it goes to aaron, but instead of finding the last email it finds a random one from last year.    Is it just me, or is apple completely useless when it comes to finding things?  I'm having similar issues with spotlight. 

Answer 1

in any window on a mac, if you just type a letter on the keyboard, the selection in that window will go to a file beginning with that name.   In Eudora, if mail window was sorted by NAME and you typed "E" the selection would move to the last email received from a person who's NAME began with "E",  if you typed "El" it would move to the most recent email received from a person named "El"  if you typed "Ela"  the selection would move to the most recent email received from a person named "Ela".   If mail was sorted by SUBJECT, it would move to the SUBJECT with those same beginning letters.   In mac mail the selection doesn't pick the most recent email, but a completely random one, and it doesn't differentiate between subjects and senders.   If I type "josh" it goes to an email with subject: josh, from 2011, not the most recent email from my friend josh that I got yesterday, even though I have my mail sorted by name.   If I type "Karen", selection moves to an email received from Karen in 2010, not the one I received 2 weeks ago.    In other words, it's completely random and useless. 
only way to find something in macmail is to type a name into search box, then organize by name, then scroll to that name, only sometimes those name emails are not sorted by date, so you have to look through to find the most recent one.  then once you found it, you need to delete what's in the search box, and reset the sortation to be by date in order to have a chronological listing of you emails.  In other words, many complicated steps instead of one simple one.