For home use and personal E-Mail I prefer a client that can be opened and closed. At the same time I disabled all notifications on my Desktop where possible. So

For home use and personal E-Mail I prefer a client that can be opened and closed. At the same time I disabled all notifications on my Desktop where possible. So I might not be in your target group. Although for work use I lean more towards a more present mail client. In any case, I think that's a cool direction. I have a love-hate relationship with Thunderbird since it has so many features that I don't use and some features I need - at work for instance Exchange support or Encryption - have only flaky plugin support. Also I totally not use HTML mail, on the other hand console clients just don't work for me. So I end up using Web mail clients which is not super practical always...