In a Thunderbird vs. Mutt comparison I think personal preference and primary use case factors in pretty heavily. There are people who find working primarily in

In a Thunderbird vs. Mutt comparison I think personal preference and primary use case factors in pretty heavily. There are people who find working primarily in a terminal (usually, multiple) better for them. Perhaps by no coincidence, I've noticed that these people tend to work in circles where HTML email is not common, so there is little gain in "going GUI" for email. Terminal programs, by definition and necessity, have a focus on efficient and comprehensive keyboard navigation. It is a rare GUI program that maintains a similar focus on keyboard navigation. (Thunderbird might be one, I don't know) You can ssh into a box somewhere and use terminal programs and they feel native. Remote access to GUI programs is usually a larger compromise. I tend to feel much more "in control" of my email workflow when I can set up complex filters, which usually leads me away from IMAP and toward email on the local disk. I've found that "old school" mail programs handle this use case better than GUI ones (which are usually focused on IMAP). So, personally, I'm either reading mail from local storage with an old-school mail reader (for very high volume, tech related, work related, stuff), or going full cloud and using webmail (for lower volume personal mail). That way I can always get to my mail from anywhere, seamlessly (be it ssh or a browser).