To read mail, I used (version 5 of) Kyle Jones's VM, but (out of my being too lazy to configure mail fetching and mail sending) switched to gmail.com about 6 years ago.

I never embraced org mode because I didn't want to learn another few dozen keyboard shortcuts ("keys" in Emacs terminology). There are for example in org mode keyboard shortcuts for moving the current line up a line and down a line. Even before I saw vscode my reaction to learning about those 2 shortcuts was that such functionality would be useful (particularly in to-do lists), but I would prefer to execute the functionality by dragging with the mouse, which it turns out that vscode lets me do (in its default configuration): particularly, I click on the line's line number to select the line (to set the mark and activate the region in Emacs terminology) then move the mouse cursor into the selection, then drag. (In emacs, I'd kill and yank to move a line relative to the other lines -- and I configured my emacs to have a menu on the right mouse button with the kill and yank actions on it.)

In general, vscode is a nice environment for keeping to-do lists. Consider for example this next small "hierarchy" of actions:

  buy milk

      drive to store

          find car keys

If we replace "find car keys" above with a string of text too long to fit on one line, then the basic structure of the small hierarchy becomes obscured in Emacs (even with visual-line mode on) but not in vscode as I explain in greater detail here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25311743