Was with you until this point. A good tool doesn't limit what the user can do on the grounds of ideological purity.
If some corporate doofus wants to reply in red, that's their business. If your tool won't display colored text you need a better tool.
I've never tried Gnus for email because VM has always met my needs. It does an amazingly good job rendering HTML mail into something readable on a text terminal (the way I use VM and Emacs), complete with keyboard-navigable links that VM sends to an external web browser, and for the few times I need to see the actual graphics, a single keystroke sends the message's source to said browser.
Personality Crisis (which is nowadays included with VM, as opposed to being separate back when you used it) automatically rewrites the From: line based on the message I'm replying to. Using BBDB, Personality Crisis also does so when creating a new message based on the recipient. Mairix handles superfast searching of my decades of mail archives.
You know this of course, but I can't overstate to other people how nice being able to modify/extend VM with Elisp is. I rewrote the link-navigation code to handle all link types, and wrote the code that the abovementioned single keystroke invokes.
VM isn't perfect. I know that I could do all of the above with Gnus, and quite possibly am missing out on other features that VM lacks. Overall, though, I really feel like I have a superpower for email handling with it.
This is an objectively ridiculous statement.
A person using a modern email client can confine themselves to a single font and color, or they can use formatting. They can read plaintext mails, and they can read complex emails.
Being flexible > being dogmatic about other people communicate.
People who depend on the typeface, size and color to convey essential meaning end up communicating poorly.
Plaintext bigots love to assert that there's no communicative value in formatted or colored text, but that doesn't make it true.
The world has moved on. This argument was litigated and lost by the plaintext partisans when Clinton was president.
And I could be wrong, but AFAIK neomutt at least supports server side search.
1. https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc9051.html#name-search-command 2. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5228
I have a couple hundred thousand emails in FastMail and both their web client and Apple’s Mail app seem to scale to this absolutely no problem.
100k emails is way way less data than you think it is. Will likely fit in your laptop’s RAM!
If you miss mh/nmh and wish that it had a wrapper that could do everything and made sense, mutt is your savior.
If you work with people who think that changing the colors and fonts in a message is a good way of clarifying what they are responding to, go find different people to work with.
If you need to spend several minutes synthesizing a reply from a bunch of different messages all of which should be on-screen at once, (a) you have my sympathies, and (b) yes, you need a GUI mail client.