Can I do this (should I do this) with Mutt?

[Francesco Ariis]

Hello John,
    I will try to answer for what my experience is:

On Wed, May 22, 2019 at 03:03:42PM +0000, John Long wrote:
> 1. Is it reasonable to use Mutt with many email accounts? I know you
> probably can, but is it reasonable as in, is it manageable, is the
> performance good enough on a midrange box. Usability stuff, like will
> mutt automagically respond using the correct account (the account the
> email I'm replying to was received by), is it clear when you compose
> which account you're using. Etc.

I have many accounts, a couple of simple hooks like

    folder-hook fa-ml "set from=fa-ml at ariis.it"

suffice here.

> 2. I have around 100,000 emails right now between all my accounts. I
> have one pop account because my ISP mail server doesn't support IMAP.
> I use IMAP with all the rest. I like having the email on my box(es)
> rather than leaving it on servers. Of the mailbox flavors, which is
> appropriate for this volume of email?...and also for the let's say 200
> a day I get between the various mailing lists I'm on.

I delete my emails daily, so I cannot answer from experience;
I know that there are indexing options, like marix, and that folks
speak good things about them.

> 3. I seem to remember that mutt didn't poll automagically for pop3 or
> IMAP or both. Is that still true? Is there a way to get mutt to check
> mail every 10 minutes, 15, etc. without middleware? I don't want to get
> into fetchmail, getmail etc. I want the client to do it all.

Not that I know, I myself use a cronjob + getmail.

> 4. For the idiots who persist in sending HTML email, even my current
> GUI client borks, sometimes badly, and the email is unreadable. Is
> there any tolerable HTML support in Mutt?

I have mailcap configured like this

    text/html; mkdir -p /tmp/mutt \; cp %s /tmp/mutt \; qupzilla /tmp/mutt/$(basename %s)

and when someone sends an html-only email I open the attachment and it
pops up in my browser.
Hope it was helpful, good luck finding a mail client that suits your
needs!