If you like Mutt, you might really love Aerc -- https://aerc-mail.org/

Aerc looks amazing, but I am still waiting for threading support before making the jump [1]. To the best of my knowledge, it supports everything else I would need.

[1]: https://todo.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/aerc2/94

My current stack is: Mutt, Neovim, fdm, msmtp, Syncthing, notmuch, lynx (for HTML conversion), mblaze [2] (for scripting), and a tiny pair of scripts to snooze and unsnooze e-mails. Here is an interesting observation, although a pipeline like this may look terrifying, it makes swapping in Aerc to take it for a spin trivial since it all interacts with a Maildir.

[2]: https://github.com/leahneukirchen/mblaze

Not sure why but in my case mutt + maildir is really slow. Loading a folder takes around 10s for 300 emails and slightly less than 2m with 3000.

The trick seems to be caching mail headers, https://gitlab.com/muttmua/mutt/-/wikis/MuttGuide/Caching

Also if you change folders frequently you can put: set sleep_time=0

Thanks for the advice but i don't think caching is the problem, as i'm using a local directory. It's parsing that takes a very long time. Or does caching take parsing into account? (that's not what the caching guide says)

Something is wrong there. I can open a folder with >50k emails and it takes less than 5 seconds.

I’m a mutt + local postfix person. I love it’s simplicity and not needing to leave the terminal. Also, having it in a tmux is only a few keystrokes away

local postfix, as in "postfix configured as forwarding-smtp relay" ? note that this will normally leak your IP address in SMTP headers.

Yeah, I forward to a smart host. And I’m probably fine about leaking local IP since I’m usually communicating with people who know where I live anyway :)

or mutt + offlineimap

mutt + mbsync with a local copy is also a nice combination.