I'd personally recommend the opposite: start vanilla (with Evil) and understand why you're including every package you do. But you might not find that productiv

I'd personally recommend the opposite: start vanilla (with Evil) and understand why you're including every package you do. But you might not find that productive enough to stick with, so maybe try DOOM or Spacemacs as well? Org mode is good, but most Emacs mail clients are pretty meh. The primary advantage is getting to use the same interface to everything and being able to customize everything easily. With the relatively small volume of email that I process, it's just too much work to keep all of the configuration working for mail in Emacs. Magit is cool, I think you'll enjoy it.