I got a lot of help from Peter while setting up heirloom-mailx, and it might have made the difference for me. I find that I enjoy this quite a bit.
I’m still working out all the small details, but so far I can check mail out of a GMail account, reply, sort and so forth. I’m definitely not an expert, but I’m working on it.
I use alpine usually, and this has a few small advantages over alpine that I can see off the bat.
One-file configuration was nice. alpine has a massive list of options that can sometimes obscure things for me, even after years of digging around in it.
As you might imagine, heirloom-mailx is quite light, and quite quick. On the other hand, it’s very terse, and expects you to know what you’re doing.
I do like that it sends most everything into your $PAGER, for reading or displaying messages. And the man page is nothing if not replete — it even has a narrative near the end, stepping you through processes.
The funny part of this is, I can remember for years now, seeing heirloom-mailx as part of default installations (usually Arch). Never tried it.
Glad I did. And thanks again to Peter, for his help. Cheers! 😀
P.S.: I’m going to share the sites that Peter linked for me, that helped with a GMail setup. …
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=103322
http://www.thelinuxtips.com/2011/09/sending-email-via-gmail-in-linux/
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=23554535
Good luck!
Inconsolation 
In Arch, heirloom-mailx has been replaced by s-nail since late September. Heirloom-mailx is apparently unmaintained, and s-nail is a fork which enjoys active development.
https://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2013-September/025464.html
(Thanks for the link karol)
You’re right, and I saw that. I had already gotten a lot of help from Peter though, and I didn’t want to postpone it to the S section. I should have mentioned it though, in the post. Thanks!
Glad you got it working 🙂
S-Nail for me still has some issues (particularly in the way threaded mode is displayed) but that said it is a project I support whole heartedly, as far as I’m aware heirloom-mailx is considered by its developer finished and is in maintenance only mode in terms of development.
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