I'm sorry it didn't work for you, but your hostility about it gives me the impression you became frustrated configuring advanced stuff that perhaps you don't understand or need. If you never, say, want to select a group of messages based on a regular expression, absolutely, stick with Outlook or whatever. If you never need different contextual handling (say, signing mail only from a particular account, add particular headers when sending to some address, etc.), then I'm sure the configurability looks stupid.

Put another way, you can complain that a pickup truck isn't a Prius, but you should expect people who use (not just drive) pickups to snicker.

I use mutt (and vim, but that's a different post) heavily because it saves me so much time. Sure, there's a learning curve, but there is no faster mail client out there for handling large volumes of mail.

Speed:

- It is entirely keyboard driven.

- Until you have >6 figures of mail in one mbox, every action is essentially instant. And then you only wait a bit on load/save.

- If you have to deal with automated mail systems and the occasional mail disasters caused by them, the regex manipulation is a godsend.

- I think people don't notice the little delays in GUIs, but when you're going through hundreds of messages, it adds up.

Other awesome features:

- If you ever have to deal with GPG, mutt is the place to configure it. I don't use it much, but it is part of the workflow for some open source projects. I've configured it in various GUI MUAs, and it seems like every time I do try to sign something, it broke in some annoying way. Mutt is loosely coupled enough that that doesn't happen.

- Works over ssh. Yes, this absolutely matters to me - can't live without it.

- Extremely extensible. Add a configurable MDA[1]. I've built entire little adhoc apps based on email for various purposes.

[1] I actually still use procmail, because the syntax ate by brain a long time ago, but I'd recommend something less obtuse if you're starting fresh.