So mutt is still receiving releases? That's neat. I may have to revisit and see what's new in 2.0.

I went through a CLI-only phase where I didn't use a desktop environment. My "DE" was just tmux in a pseudo-terminal. The main reason I went back to a graphical workstation was a need for G Suite and Slack's horrible support for Weechat. Mutt was a critical member of the toolkit and I have fond memories of hyper productivity. Search was crap though.

If you're thinking about doing this, I recommend trying to live in a VM running Fedora Server or Arch or Ubuntu Server or something. If you find yourself unable to use a CLI browser for some reason, at least you don't have to tell work "sorry I gotta install my OS before I can look at " (that doesn't go over well).

I you revisit, be sure to check out notmuch as the search backend. It is super fast and has a nice and powerful search syntax.

[1] https://notmuchmail.org/notmuch-mutt/

I recommend you take a look at neomutt. Neomutt integrates notmuch by default and has a lot of the patches that mutt never merged in it.

https://neomutt.org/feature

https://github.com/neomutt/neomutt