Jack asks "why did we ever abandon Mutt and Pine?"

I don't know about you, but I didn't. I still swear by pine -- I use it on handheld devices a lot, because it does actually integrate well enough into that environment. With a touch screen, and pine's 'mouse-in-xterm' option, you can just tap on menu options, on mails in the folder index, etc. You don't actually need to use the fake on-screen keyboard for anything much in order to read mail with pine.

I also often find myself running pine on 'real' computers -- I often fire it up to read my mail while I'm waiting for Evolution, in fact. But the main reasons I don't use it all the time are twofold:

Firstly it's because I just don't think I could live without the little tree of folders which you see on the left-hand side of just about every GUI mailer these days -- the one which tells me how many unread messages are in each folder. That's integral to how I deal with mail these days.

Secondly, I very much like composing new email in separate windows, rather than in the main mail reader window. I have habit of hitting 'reply', perhaps making a half-hearted attempt to respond to an email, and then getting distracted and leaving it for days before I eventually find it the composer window on my desktop again, finish it off and send it. If I didn't do that, then stuff would just get lost and I'd never reply to it. I'm bad enough already.

For short-term use though, such as when I quickly connect by GPRS to check for new email in my inbox, pine is just great.

I'm not sure why Pete seems to suggest that, as a text mode application, cut and paste shouldn't work. Yes, they're not "integrated with the desktop" and they don't have dbus notifications or panel applets, but cut and paste generally work fine in an xterm. In fact, it's Evolution where cut and paste is generally screwed, in my experience. I've never had a problem using cut and paste with pine.

Hopefully the Sylpheed crash will get looked at more quickly than Evolution bugs do, and I'll be able to properly assess Sylpheed's suitability some time soon.