Many people can’t imagine life without a shiny, GUI-based email client. The idea of using a text based client would never occur to them and some probably don’t even know there are such things. Others of us don’t want to waste our time clicking around a GUI app or Web Email page. We like doing things from the keyboard and, if you’re a hardcore Emacser, handling our email from within our editor.
Shreyas Ragavan is in the latter group and has a very nice post on why he thinks text based clients are the best solution. He had three email accounts and wanted to handle them in a unified way. His first step was the get a paid Fastmail account and forward his other accounts through it. That makes dealing with email from separate accounts much easier. I do something similar and have my email client (mu4e) set to respond with a From: address that matches the To: address of the original email.
Ragavan, like me, uses mu/mu4e. He finds that it integrates very well with his workflow. If he’s working in Emacs on some other task and finds he needs to dash off a quick email, mu4e is only a couple of keystrokes away. If he wants to turn an email into a task, that too is only a few keystrokes away. And, of course, he avoids the context switch that invoking a separate email client involves.
Like Ragavan, I love using mu4e. It makes working with email easier, keeps me in Emacs, and I can easily turn an email into an actionable task or put a link to an email into any of my Org files.