As far as console clients go Mew does very well with imap, in fact more reliably than most of the gui clients I've tried. It happily pulled down multi-GB Gmail mailboxes and kept them in sync without any issues, has sane disconnected-mode behavior, handled network failures well, etc. It's implemented inside emacs, but you don't have to be a heavy emacs user to use it and one of the vi-emulation modes might help if not. Built-in ssh tunneling support; good support for mime, pgp, s/mime; and pluggable search options were what convinced me. It depends on stunnel for ssl/tls, but I'm happy they're not reimplementing support. The manual could use some work, but it's relatively extensive.
Comments
As far as console clients go Mew does very well with imap, in fact more reliably than most of the gui clients I've tried. It happily pulled down multi-GB Gmail mailboxes and kept them in sync without any issues, has sane disconnected-mode behavior, handled network failures well, etc. It's implemented inside emacs, but you don't have to be a heavy emacs user to use it and one of the vi-emulation modes might help if not. Built-in ssh tunneling support; good support for mime, pgp, s/mime; and pluggable search options were what convinced me. It depends on stunnel for ssl/tls, but I'm happy they're not reimplementing support. The manual could use some work, but it's relatively extensive.
https://github.com/kazu-yamamoto/Mew http://www.mew.org/en/info/release/