Alpine

Alpine, not to be confused with the Linux distro [1], is wonderful. I had used Pine since the '90s because nothing comes close to the speed of checking email directly on the email server itself via a TUI. Alpine, I learned, is a suitable successor to Pine, and is even better.

It's definitely faster than Pine, particularly in searches and applying actions to groups of messages. It has several cute little animations which play while waiting for a mailbox to open which, while not practical, is nice. It supports OATH so I don't have to deal with the absolute hell which is the Gmail web interface when I need to access Gmail email.

If nothing else, it's an excellent tool to keep around when there are other problems and you either need to send / check email quickly, or you want to diagnose mail problems and want to take your local email client out of the equation. Highly recommended!

[1] I had followed someone on Twitter, when it was a thing, who was active with Alpine Linux. They almost never mentioned the "Linux" part, so I genuinely thought it was an Alpine email client developer.

Alpine is a rewrite of the Pine Message System that adds support for Unicode and other features, under the Apache License. A-L-pine.