That made me switch to mutt-patched (the debian name of the package), which included the excellent "sidebar" facility. The sidebar gives you a list of all your folders you could scroll up and down, and was easily visible. You could also toggle it to show folders which only contained unread mail.
Over time I got annoyed that this still wasn't flexible enough. What if you only wanted to show folders which had received only new mail in the past 24 hours?
In the end I wrote my own console-based mail-client, which uses lua for scripting:
This allows me to automate many things, for example I can mark each mail about a system-backup as read - if it succeeded, this level of automation isn't possible easily with mutt. Having a _real_ configuration language and binding functions to keys is very very handy though.
I didn't ever expect my client to become super-popular, as it seems few people choose console clients these days, but it is nice to see that it has a little bit of love.