I use offlineimap to get my mail to my local machine in maildir format, so no need for any imap etc in mutt. Bonus: I can use tools like cat and grep etc on the emails.

Also, there's a lot of tools to have mutt imap support work with gmail/office365 etc.

cat and grep are not the tools to deal with HTML content.

I think you’re mistaken. Mutt works fine with IMAP servers. It’s quite flexible. In the small minority of cases when I need to see the email in a full-blown web browser, it takes two keystrokes to open it there.

I know this. i've spent a lot of time years ago to configure mutt to fetch my gmail/hotmail/free accounts and it worked pretty well. But when you change computer hardware what a hassle to reconfigure everything. Such a simple thing like sending email should now be a no-brainer. i quit this dogma to use my brain for more insighful things

mutt config is just plain text files. Store them in git/ftp/http server nad grab them to a new machine and everything JustWorks

Imap proxies aren't just a question of conf files.

Email today should be a no-brainer really. Its a hobby to configure mutt.

You dont need imap proxies.

If you want your email locally: Use offlineimap to grab the email for example. There are many ways to connect. If not: there are a lot of python/bash scripts to make imap/whatever work with mutt

Almost all of them use configuration files that can be stored in git/svn/csv/etc

The thing about offlineimap and isync (which I prefer because it is significantly faster in my experience) is they work great until they don't. I originally switched from offlineimap to isync, because of some bug (might have been offlineimap or exchange IMAP support, I don't recall) which caused some email loss. Just this week I had to deal with some isync issue which causes the sync to duplicate mails when uploading to the server. I still haven't figured out what's going on, I'm getting Keywords not supported errors from the server when syncing, which caused this. It happened once before and I had to wipe the whole directory and resync to fix it.

I am now looking at what other solution to use. I used to use muttator which was a plugin for thunderbird that emulated mutt behavior and was great, but that hasn't been maintained for >7 years

offlineimap is what a used. But now i don't have time for the configuration of this. seems today pretty archaic.

I configured mine only on the days I switched jobs. Copy one entry to a new one, changed name, changed password/oauth keys and ran `git add .dotfiles/offlineimap.conf && git commit -m "new work email configs" && git push` and call it a day. This is less time than I spend with ANY other program I use at a new job

How many time you spent the first time you digged into theses tools ? i'm sorry but i'm ready to spend huge amount of time to learn tools like GCC or anything else that's complex. Not for sending mail.