Offlineimap + Mutt = Less Pain
I receive a lot of email as im a system administrator in order to handle this i prefer to use Mutt. One problem, Mutt sucks when using imap connections. In order to over come this you can use a nice little util called offlineimap that with sync a imap server to a local folder in mail dir format.
So the flow of mail into my computer is now Imap Server -> Offlineimap -> Mutt -> Offlineimap -> Imap Server