Mutt Pine and Elm

First Forget Pine and Elm for email

Both pine and elm should be avoided as being your MUA (mail user agent). They both have the potential to lose your mail. They use locking mechanisms for mail folders (files) that can cause inconsistencies when multiple instances of the application are running at the same time (meaning two elm sessions at once). If you use pine or elm, at some time they will lose your mail.

Also, both projects are not actively developed. pine has not had a release for over a year, and for elm it has been even longer. This means that new features are not included in pine or elm, including well written pgp/gpg support and handling newer RFCs regarding mail transport.

Well that just leaves Mutt

Mutt is a small but very powerful text based program for reading electronic mail under unix operating systems, including support color terminals, MIME, and a threaded sorting mode.

On Milkshake all email is stored in /var/lib/vpopmail/domains// and can be read as follows:

milk:/var/lib/vpopmail/domains/och.org.uk# mutt -f postmaster