You should take a look at notmuch [1]. It takes a little bit of time to get started (I recommend afew [2] for initial tagging), but I don't think I could ever go back to another mail system. It changes the way that you go through mail, no more folders: between tagging and extremely fast searches, there's no need. Just like an application launcher on modern desktops, there's no need to go through a big menu: press your search key, type what you're thinking, and there it is.

It doubles the size of your maildir with the indexing, which is a downside if you're crunched for space, but maybe that gives you an idea for just how much is indexed and how fast you can expect searching to be.

It's fair to say that the most popular interface for it is the emacs interface, which is great if you're already using emacs for mail because your workflow won't change substantially. There are other interfaces available, I have used one called alot [3] and find it to be very good as well.

[1]: https://notmuchmail.org/

[2]: https://github.com/afewmail/afew

[3]: https://github.com/pazz/alot

Tried that — it kept choking on the 80k or so emails in my inbox. Apparently mu4e users just have tidy folder organization schemes from what I was told on mail list. I got spoiled by gmail and never sort my mail. In fact my dependence on search is why I turned to mu4e in the first place. I just assumed a unixy toolkit would scale just fine (bad assumption!).

I’m using this setup too for quite a while now and overall, I’m pretty happy with it. But some HTML mail is barely readable. How do you deal with that?

I’ve written an emacs function which opens the mail in firefox, but I’m not really fond of that as every remote content is loaded by the browser. Is there a way to stop that?

with the xwidgets functionality its possible to view html mail in fashion that looks pretty much like chrome/firefox inside emacs with webkitgtk sadly I can't seem to get that feature working on my emacs on funtoo or manjaro.

See. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mu-discuss/JqHEGycEy...

If you have any suggestions regarding this I'd love to hear it.

Use w3m to view HTML email. Does a great job even with tables.