email has to go console. Linux powerfull tools are needed to process them faster, to find old emails etc. So far I started to use intensivelly the following tools:

• mbsync (will have a look also at offlineimap as alternative) for synchronising imap with maildir

• mutt for reading email. I tried pine earlier, but mutt is much much better

• mairix, mu,

• tagging??? since I learned the tagging of gmail, I find it very powerfull. I wish mutt would implement that. Unfortunatelly, gmail imap does not seem to share the tagging information on the imap interface. Maybe one day they will add the X-Label tag to the emails. Mutt can process the X-Label see this article.  So far I found people with similar problems/wishes:
  link1, link2
• listing of tools for maildir: http://www.qmail.org/top.html#maildir

• other tools, I will for sure have a look: http://www.nongnu.org/nmh/

• this link contains an overview of available mail tools for linux