Adam is delving into the world of email again and mentions that Pine rules. I have to agree, but I'm not quite as quick to shrug off graphical email programs. I think one issue is that many mail systems are not set up for how people would like to use mail. In my case, I solved this problem by kind of rolling my own solution.
My email comes into my ISP and is downloadable via POP. This is their primary way of making email available to their customers. For most people, this would probably be fine, since they read their email on their home computer. For me, this was an issue. I have a laptop, I sometimes am home at my parents and dialing up there is a pain. Looking around I found the perfect solution for myself.
I have two Macs. I've got my TiBook, which goes just about everywhere with me. And a B&W G3, which sits at home and does all kinds of serverish things. OS X is installed on each of them. While looking around for solutions to my email problem, I looked over on Stepwise and found an article on Email Servers and Mac OS X. This was the perfect starting point. My system now loads email from my ISP using fetchmail, runs it through spamassassin, filters it via procmail, and then I can read it either with something like Pine from a terminal window, or I can use Entourage and read it via IMAP from wherever I am.
This solution kicks ass for me because it means that no matter where I am I can access my email, even if it means using ssh to get into my G3 remotely. Procmail and Spamassassin have done a wonderful job in filtering my email and reducing the amount of spam that gets into my inbox.
