That does sound like a possible work-around, I might try moving to mutt again. But what about when you want to create one of those yourself? Or to reply inline to parts of theirs? How is that handled, do you write HTML?
One of the few reasons I have to mess around with NoMachine etc is for email, if I could get it in a terminal over ssh that'd be great. I did try a few years ago and after wasting a lot of time sorting the config, the lack of good reading experience for rich content emails was enough for me to dump the whole thing.