I have taken the time to try to work with Mutt, and some other console email tools. I would love to be using something like that full-time, since I practically live in terminal windows.

But ultimately I can't; I don't need pretty colors or graphical tricks. I do need something which understands that it's not 1975 anymore. My mail no longer lives in a local spool file, and there is no longer a local sendmail. I have multiple email addresses, which use IMAP, and remote SMTP.

And none of the console clients -- including Mutt -- can really do that. Every couple years I try Mutt again, and try whatever the current crop of attempted successors are, and get thrown right back into 1975 again and give up in frustration.

(and Mutt, last I checked, actually considers it both a feature and a point of philosophical purity/pride to refuse to acknowledge the fact that anything other than "shell out to local sendmail" exists. Also, IMAP was unbearably slow, usually requiring a full re-fetch/re-index of the entire remote inbox, potentially hundreds of thousands of messages, every time Mutt started up, and multiple IMAP accounts were an unholy mess)

While I find working with multiple accounts awkward, I find that Mutt has no problem submitting mail via SMTP; and once I enable message header & body caching, IMAP accounts become perfectly fast to use.

And if you have GMail, you can patch it to do server-side search as well:

http://people.spodhuis.org/phil.pennock/software/mutt-patche...

Still, I like Mail.app better, since it supports multiple accounts well and has excellent search.

As far as console clients go Mew does very well with imap, in fact more reliably than most of the gui clients I've tried. It happily pulled down multi-GB Gmail mailboxes and kept them in sync without any issues, has sane disconnected-mode behavior, handled network failures well, etc. It's implemented inside emacs, but you don't have to be a heavy emacs user to use it and one of the vi-emulation modes might help if not. Built-in ssh tunneling support; good support for mime, pgp, s/mime; and pluggable search options were what convinced me. It depends on stunnel for ssl/tls, but I'm happy they're not reimplementing support. The manual could use some work, but it's relatively extensive.

https://github.com/kazu-yamamoto/Mew http://www.mew.org/en/info/release/

Like you, I have several different e-mail accounts (all "remote") and send through a number of different mail servers (depending on the account, of course). I use mutt 99% of the time, on my laptop, wherever I may be (home, friends' homes, customer sites, public hotspots, etc.). I couldn't (easily) do it with just mutt but with the help of various external tools (such as offlineimap, msmtp, and notmuch) I have no problems or hoops to jump through on a daily basis to make things work.

You might enjoy my new scriptable client then, although it suffers from a few design decisions I believe are acceptable:

* Maildir only. * Shell out to sendmail.

I do enjoy scripting though; for example viewing all unread messages regardless of folder, or marking messages as read based on regexps.

http://lumail.org/

My personal experience is that, I like how mutt looks and the fact that I'm able to deal with emails in CLI. The reason I'm not using it as my main email client (yet) is that I can't remember all shortcuts and I don't know enough what exactly each keystroke does to my emails and email server. These can all be fixed by reading docs and more practice though. I guess it's the same thing as vim. Once you are used to it, it becomes the favorite.

And like vim, you will probably never use, nor need, all the shortcuts available. I use about a dozen keys in mutt, some of which are custom binding I use to send messages to separate maildir in one keystroke.

All my emails get into my Inbox (except for bugzilla stuff). I go through my Inbox several times a day, and as I read messages, I press 'o', 'n', 'e', or 'a' to send the message in one of the four folders I mostly use. For the rest, I sort it manually using the 's' key. This way, my Inbox is always empty. Or if it's not, I know it's a message I need to get back to later on. There's usually no more than a handful of those.

Granted, you can do that with any mail client. But mutt is particularly well suited for the job.