I made the switch — back
I really hate email. It is a system that is broken, misused, and abused, and designed that way. For a long time I used Evolution, but when I switched to Mac from Linux I started to use Mail.App. What an abortion: No fixed line width, crazy variable fonts, no built-in pgp support, and worse yet, a junk mail filter that would mark mail as junk even if it was legit!
So I threw in the towel and went back to my old standby[0]: mutt. It is ugly, it is text based, it doesn’t view html mails, it doesn’t have auto-mail filters. It just does one thing and does it well: mail.
Throw in a mail fetching program, fetchmail, a filter program, procmail, and all I ever need is there. Need a pgp plugin? Mutt supports it out of the box. Address book? That’s what .muttrc is for. And to top it all off, since this is a program that runs in a terminal or console, I can use screen to check my mail from anywhere, including my cell phone! And since I don’t keep old mail on the pop3 server, I can check it using the Treo’s Mail app for offline reading on Bart.
In short: mutt is ugly, but it makes email bearable.
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[0]This was for work email. I still use pine for personal mail, but that may change soon.