> It is more a matter of functionality than opinion. Much of my email > contains non-text parts that mutt wouldn't handle. And I find the > ability to drag messages among folders on different accounts on > different machines to be much more convenient than whatever method you > might use in mutt to accomplish that (I haven't used mutt over imap so > I'm not sure it is even possible). You can handle non-text/plain parts in mutt. I don't have any of that turned on automatically, and typically just save any parts that I want to do stuff with later. But you can trigger executing an external viewer in mutt. I believe this is a lot safer than reading data that can be sent to you unsolicited in a program using X that will fire up plugins without user intervention. > Thunderbird, evolution, kmail, outlook, apple mail, etc. are all pretty > feature-complete. Thunderbird has the advantage of running on most > common platforms so you can use it from about anywhere accessing the > same accounts if you work on different machines and it will look/work > about the same. Do you have an example of a mutt-exclusive feature? I doubt anything is mutt exclusive. It does have some nice features like being able to tag sets of messages and then apply commands to every message in the set. > > Running imap over ssl provides the same security, although some places mutt can handle imap and pop folders. > may not have it available everywhere ssh is permitted. You can also > port-forward through ssh/putty, but that is a little more cumbersome. > But, if you ever send files from your local machine as email attachments > through your mutt account you must already be dealing with some > inconvenience. If I want to send an attachment from a different machine than the one I am running mutt on, I'll scp it over. I would have the option to run mutt locally and adjust the headers before sending as well. (I don't read email on other people's machines and hence mutt will be installed.)