set header_cache="~/.mutt/hcache"

I have more than 10k emails sitting in my inbox and with this option mutt loads the headers in around one second (over the Internet).

And of course I could fetch all the emails in the background and use mutt locally, but I didn't bother yet.

>I resigned from a terminal IM client, because it made me less productive than a GUI client. Additionally, some features were annoying.

Using mibbit or bitlbee with an IRC client works for me.

EDIT: Not mibbit, I meant minbif (http://minbif.im/)

+ 1 on bitlbee. I use it with weechat-curses.

IM was one of the last graphical applications to go for me (I'm the author of the article). I had the same problem until I discovered bsflite (http://bsflite.sourceforge.net/).

mutt is traditionally used together with a mail transfer agent (MTA) and other software to fetch the e-mail. mutt is only used for reading e-mail, not sending, receiveing or writing, there's other software for that.

There's POP, IMAP and SMTP support in mutt for convinience, but that has to be enabled explicitly at compile time. However, this means that mutt will fetch all the mails when it starts and this is slower than having it already locally fetched.

I thought you would use (e.g.) sendmail to get the mail from the server to your local inbox, and then use pine or mutt to manage them?