dwmw2 mentioned that he can't live without a tree view of mail folders showing which have new messages.
I currently use a combination of procmail, mutt, and my own scripts to sort and read mail. The procmail script sorts the mail into organized mbox files in ~/Mail/. Then I run newmail to get a list of mailboxes with new messages in them. Then I use
mutt -f Mail/mboxfileto read.
Here's an example of my "newmail" output:
Total New Mbox
------ ------ ----------------------------------------------
55 1 barry
158 21 *bochs-dev (1)
2096 1405 boost
446 444 *bugtraq (3)
80 78 bugtraq-generic
402 144 c++
4072 3 canada-dmca-opponents
1200 157 *cdfrey (1)
166 120 debian
246 67 gentoo-announce
41 15 *gentoo-desktop (1)
1848 1022 gentoo-dev
38 6 gentoo-gwn
82 28 gentoo-hardened
355 237 *gentoo-portage-dev (1)
605 62 gentoo-security
276 247 *gentoo-server (4)
1217 1217 git
11 10 gnupg-announce
91 90 gnupg-devel
423 331 gnupg-users
129 82 kt
1162 8 kwlug
364 133 libusb
10023 10022 linux-kernel
601 344 linux-thinkpad
144 144 *mailer-daemon (5)
551 314 mplayer-users
411 401 open-graphics
1404 164 plusplus
541 35 plusplus-commits
63 34 risks
211 189 slashdot
47 2 spca50x-devs
8 1 xboard
Yes, I'm a little behind. :-) This shows the total messages in the mbox file, the total unread messages, which mboxes have had new mail since I last checked (*), and how many new messages arrived since I last checked.
It's worked pretty well, not only as a mail system but as a spam whitelist too. I only use the code personally, so the code isn't polished for release. It's a single .cc file that can be compiled standalone, so it shouldn't be too hard to play with if you want.
- Update: Found a bug where two uninitialized variables cause a new mail count to be out of whack the first time you run it. Once the mailbox data is cached, behaviour is normal.
Grab the file again if this matters to you.