The key advantage to mutt is the limit/tag/pattern workflow. Everything else is more or less the way other mail clients work. A pattern is a mail-specialized r

The key advantage to mutt is the limit/tag/pattern workflow. Everything else is more or less the way other mail clients work. A pattern is a mail-specialized regular expression. There are shortcuts for the things that you are likely to be interested in: From and Cc, To, Subject, Date, status flags. After a few uses of each, they'll start to feel natural. The limit/tag/pattern workflow goes like this. Start in a mailbox view -- say, your overloaded Inbox. Use a limit pattern to see just a subset of the mailbox -- l ~fjira to limit to messages from a sender with jira in their name or address. Use T to tag a pattern -- by default the one you just used. Then prefix any command with ; to make it apply to all the tagged messages. That isn't just deleting them or moving them off to a different mailbox. You can forward them all as attachments, or respond to them all as one message, feed them to a command line process or give them a new status flag. You can also tag and untag messages one at a time, if you need fine control but don't want to figure out a narrowed pattern. Then, untag anything left and unlimit back to the full mailbox. The key is that this happens much faster than you can possibly make selections with a cursor in a GUI, and much faster than you can make selections with a scrolling TUI. And patterns don't miss something by accident. One of my favorite limit patterns is "l~d<2d ~d>1d\n" which I have aliased to ".y". It shows everything that came in yesterday. You might be surprised how often this is the view that shows you what you've missed. Another great one is "l~(!~fDOMAIN)\n" which shows only threads that have outside mail addresses in them.