I always go back to mutt. It does one thing, read email, and it does it well.

The key is to set it up appropriately. Don't use mutt for downloading your email, especially if you wanna deal with IMAP. Use isync (mbsync) for that purpose (I used to use offlineimap, but it's buggy and not very fast).

There's also notmuch, which I use for indexing my email. It also contains a pretty good email reader.

  | I used to use offlineimap, but it's buggy

My favourite bug was when it was blocking on wanting a password, but wasn't accepting input. I had to kill it externally because it wasn't accepting C-\ or C-c.

I only recently discovered isync (mbsync), which is sad given that it is crazy fast and written by the mutt author.

offlineimap is cool, but it is sadly quite slow and crashes often. New releases usually bring as many bugs as they fix.

Mutt's IMAP support is working fine for me. And enabling the header cache makes opening mailboxes fast.

If your connection drops often it's a nightmare.

Until your cache header grows too much and freezes or even segfaults mutt. (Removing it fixes the issue.)

I use mutt's built-in IMAP, POP3 and SMTP. It works flawlessly for me (Mutt 1.5.21).

Thanks for the tip on isync/mbsync.

Emacs + mu + mu4e, with offlineimap. I need to switch to isync, because offlineimap is pants.

Same here, but, if you use it with Gmail, let me recommend Abdó Roig-Maranges' fork of offlineimap, which implements labels[1][2]! That way you can sync only [Gmail].All Mail and all the other info (such as /Inbox, /Sent and any other custom labels) come as X-Keywords in the header (no duplicates, and no lost metadata)[3]. And mu4e supports all this[4]!

[1] https://github.com/aroig/offlineimap

[2] The homebrew tap, if that's your thing: https://github.com/jeastman/homebrew-offlineimapwithlabels

[3] [Gmail].Trash and [Gmail].Drafts are also real folders, not just labels. You should sync them too. [Gmail].Sent Mail is just a saved search for /Sent labels. mu4e asks for a "sent" folder but, since you should (setq mu4e-sent-messages-behavior 'delete) anyway with Gmail, it becomes a dummy folder locally, and all is well.

[4] A good config example: https://github.com/pygatea/dotfiles/blob/master/emacs.d/conf...

I've bookmarked your comment. I'm gonna be forced to move back to commandline when gmail finally foists the new compose on me (fuckers[1]).

[1] Some of us want to, you know, use email for longer messages than a tweet. It's hard to do that when PgUp/PgDn are so janky. And don't even get me started on S-PgUp and S-PgDn.

Sweet. Thanks!

Maype Sup? http://sup.rubyforge.org/ https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sup

offlineimap+notmuch+alot is an quite nice combination.

I like notmuch with the Emacs notmuch client, because it'll work fine when I only have a terminal available, but when I run Emacs+X11, it'll also display images inline and has some decent mouse support.

alpine?

I used pine and alpine for a year or so, I liked it a lot.