Mutt is a text-based mail client along the lines of Pine or Elm. It's known for being a fast and highly configurable mail client, and since it is text-based, it’s ideal for checking email quickly over SSH (Secure Shell). Click through to learn exactly how to use it…

Mutt is a text based email client that is both powerful and has a lot of features,some of which you will not find in other mail clients. One problem that you will see with many mail clients is that they do not work easily with IMAPS, or secure IMAP. Mutt integrates easily with IMAPS and is easy to set up.

"There are some emacs-native programs for e-mail, such as gnus, vm and a couple of others. I never really got into them for some reason; I found them rather hard to set up and a bit counter-intuitive. Maybe I should give them another try, but for the last decade, I've been using the mutt console e-mail client - even with graphical alternatives like Evolution and Thunderbird available..."

Mutt is a text-based e-mail client for Unix-like systems. It was originally written by Michael Elkins in 1995 and released under the GNU General Public License. -- (wikipedia)

"For a very long time, I use mutt with emacsclient as configured editor and a single GNU Emacs instance started from either .screenrc or .Xsession, depending on the system.

Some of you may remember that I went on a Mutt kick there a while back and gave up for a few different reasons. I have been using Thunderbird 2.x series since, which has been pretty good, but I still think all mail clients suck. I don’t know exactly what it is about them– maybe I just don’t like email in general.

Juliet Kemp is a Mutt (powerful text email client) user, even in these modern times, and shows us how to use old-school Mutt + SSH for security on the newfangled Android G1.

Anyone that has been reading these tips for any length of time knows that I am a command-line guy. It’s faster, more efficient, and more powerful. Sure, a nice GUI is great to look at, but to really get things done, give me the CLI any day. Even to this day I still use a text-mode e-mail client (Mutt) and text-mode IRC client (Irssi).

As Gmail has IMAP access, it is fairly trivial to get it working with mutt. And who wants to leave the command line when they don't have to? Vim as an email composer? Sign me up.