I've used Alpine / Elm / Mutt. I've used gMail / Yahoo Mail / HotMail. I've used Evolution. I don't like any of them.<p>I spend 90%+ of my time on urxvt/screen/emacs/irssi. If I can get a email client that integrates nicely into this, it'd be ideal. What I <i>think</i> I really want is something that allows me to FUSE mount my email directory. So I can cd into my directories, ls to see new messages, write messages in a directory, and move them into ~/Mailbox/send/ ... to have them sent, etc ...<p>Anyone know of anything remotely like this? (Or a really cool email setup they use themselves.)<p>[On, on the FUSE side, I really like this since it allows me to use tools like grep, rm, sed / awk, ... to do funky things with my email.]
Try wanderlust on emacs <a href="http://gohome.org/wl/" rel="nofollow">http://gohome.org/wl/</a><p>o Very good IMAP support (Supports pop3,nntp,MH, filesystem too)<p>o Offline support<p>o Works perfectly on large (>2gb) imap folders<p>Use the WL from CVS as the download/documentation on the website is outdated. (<a href="http://cvs.m17n.org/viewcvs/root/wanderlust/" rel="nofollow">http://cvs.m17n.org/viewcvs/root/wanderlust/</a>)<p>Yet another imapfs implementations: IMUS (<a href="http://github.com/rtyler/imuse/tree/master/" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/rtyler/imuse/tree/master/</a>) and fuse-mail (<a href="http://code.google.com/p/fuse-mail/" rel="nofollow">http://code.google.com/p/fuse-mail/</a>).
I currently use gnus in xemacs.<p>I don't like it, but it is better than the other options I have tried. However, I may revist mutt, it has been a long time since I messed with that.<p>I originally went to gnus because I am on a lot of mailing lists and I liked the idea of handling mailling lists the same way I read usenet. I still want that, and I would probably need to do a lot of custom configuration to get that with mutt.<p>It took me a while to realize that by your "FUSE" comments you expected the mail reader to keep the mail in it's own format, and you just wanted it exposed to other tools. The useful mail clients offer a variety of back-ends, from Maildir to mbox to a remote imap server, and you can handle mbox and Mailder with grep and etc.
I still use mutt. It's not great, but it's better than anything else I've tried. I ssh to my mail server and run mutt in a screen. My mail server has imap and webmail set up too, so it's fairly convenient no matter where I am.<p>I've wanted Mutt to be properly scriptable; it doesn't have much good in the way of configuration. I've been casually puttering around ideas for a long time about writing my own email client that's much more customizable. Maybe use a database backend?<p>Edit: looking at Sup, maybe it's what I want.
I've been really enjoying sup -- <a href="http://sup.rubyforge.org/" rel="nofollow">http://sup.rubyforge.org/</a> -- in fact, that really wordy quote about five down is mine.
You want mh (mail handler) or perhaps a modern variant. I haven't used it in over a decade, but it's totally command line. Messages are actually files and folders are directories, so there's no need for FUSE or any wierd hacks like that. And there's a pretty decent emacs mode.
nmh and its Emacs client, mh-e, are pretty nice, and are an excellent fit for working in screen. It's been a couple years since I used it actively, but it's worth a look.<p>nmh in particular is a bundle of small command-line programs that "just" dump out a list of subject lines for unread messages, etc. Easy to build on.
pine is the best and has been so forever. Supports ldap, ssl, imap and nntp and much more. <a href="http://www.washington.edu/pine/" rel="nofollow">http://www.washington.edu/pine/</a>
The upas program in <a href="http://swtch.ccom/plan9port/" rel="nofollow">http://swtch.ccom/plan9port/</a> mounts remote mailboxes as file systems<p>Though see a caveat <a href="http://fixunix.com/plan9/329502-9fans-p9p-upas.html" rel="nofollow">http://fixunix.com/plan9/329502-9fans-p9p-upas.html</a><p>I don't use it myself as I run a real Plan9 system.