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 