Think about how word processors were a thing so early in personal computers, despite then actually being some of the most complicated bits of software one can build. What are e-mails if not documents?
Having some control over formatting (at least in the semantic sense, like HTML) is a core part of using computers for a huge part of the population. Yes, even the people using only their phone. People like bolding text.
A lot of people aren't good at it, but a lot of people aren't good at talking either.
(The other is "I'm old enough to have been using text email since before graphical email clients were a thing and don't want to change.")
I'm a heavy VIM user. Gmail supports VIM keybindings and there exist VIM keybinding extensions for all popular web browsers, i.e. Vimperator on Firefox.:wq
and even if it were the truth: navigating mail generally consumes the least time... actually reading the mail and deciding what to do about it takes way longer. another activity where a scroll wheel is invaluable.
Depends on the kind of email you receive.
That said, I still find Thunderbird better than mutt, even though it takes ages to do anything and crashes 3 times a day.
that's what they said back in the early 2000s too, so I tried it, but I was appalled by the horrible support for message threading and IMAP support that was missing most of the features you'd expect an IMAP client to have plus the stuff that was there was full of bugs.
I'm sure this has gotten better by now, but a blanket statement of "Graphical clients are buggy" is totally not valid. All software has bugs and depending on your priorities some might be worse than others.
* A good integration to the rest of my IDE. I need to save a chain of email as .mbox to `git am` them afterward. I have this workflow with mutt, I don't know which graphical email client would allow me to streamline this.
* In the same vein, I need to be able to use only my keyboard. I tried a little using a web client with vimperator. But the gmail interface wasn't really easy to use, I prefer using mutt properly configured.
* I also like writing my emails using VI. Having those keybindings is a proper crutch, but it's not there for text editing.
* Finally, it allows me to have a transient workspace. I can SSH on my main machine from wherever, do a `tmux attach`, and I have absolutely everything available: access to my emails, but also integration to my other tools for email analysis / processing.
This all stems from workflow derived from ancient practices, that's true. When I was starting in the industry I mostly used graphical tools. More and more however, I tend to rely on purely TUI tools. I have a few things that I can simply not give up anymore (grep, find, sed, awk, as well as full access to git).
I only use the web for accessing articles or content aggregator like Hacker News, as well as streaming music to block the open space. Ah, yes, patchwork remains web-based, I haven't really used pwclient. When I have time I will look into this.
For non-text formats, I only deal with HTML. For them, I pipe the mail through a terminal-based browser before reading it. All of this is done automatically, literally a one-line configuration in the proper file, a thing that is explained at length in most mutt guides.