Personally I've found myself fairly happy using the combo of mutt and mbsync (with gmail). It does unfortunately require downloading all your mail (Which is a b

Personally I've found myself fairly happy using the combo of mutt and mbsync (with gmail). It does unfortunately require downloading all your mail (Which is a bit messy in the beginning since Google sets a limit for how much you can download per month IIRC), but mbsync has been by far the best mail downloader/syncer I've found. I set it up probably well over a year ago now and haven't had to touch my setup or configuration at all, and it has worked perfectly the entire time. It is definitely true that mutt takes a bit of work to tame, but most of my .muttrc is just stuff I copied after googling so it really isn't too crazy. There's tons of basic 'Gmail' .muttrc's out there that you can just modify to use the maildir from mbsync rather then IMAP from gmail.