Thunderbird filters can be created to manually move mail between folders, but the filters cannot be set to run automatically, every 10 minutes. In Outlook, this is accomplished with a short VBA script that runs whenever mail is retrieved, so I wouldn't think it would be difficult in Thunderbird.
My objective is to move all messages that arrive in my ISP's (Yahoo) JUNK folder to the INBOX, so that all spam filtering is controlled by Thunderbird, which only applies spam filtering to the INBOX.
The current Thunderbird 'move' mechanism seems very slow, so a background move of a lot of messages could tie up the program for a potentially long time, however, this move-between-folders task could be limited to moving only 10(?) messages every time it runs to mitigate this delay.
The essence of the VBA code in Outlook to move a folder's contents to the Inbox is:
Set myInbox = myRoot.Folders("Inbox")
Set myItems = myRoot.Folders("Bulk").Items
For i = myItems.Count To 1 Step -1
myItems.item(i).Move myInbox
Next