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.
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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.