Email Clients Full Circle
In the beginning I used elm to read my mail. This was somewhat radical, especially as I worked with the team that created POPMail for the mac and Minuet for the PC, and everyone else moved to pine. Then came Mutt -- happy days -- I was able to slice and dice email with amazing speed.
A couple of years ago I converted over to Mail.app -- mostly because of the contacts and calendar integrations, and the fact that I could merge personal email and corp email accounts. In the intervening time I had to move to comcast, which meant running my own imap server proved more difficult than it was worth, so I moved to Google Apps for Your Domain, all of a sudden my personal domain is running Gmail, and I discovered it has key bindings.
All of a sudden it's mutt deja-vu. navigation with vi j/k keys? yes. Single window view (inbox/message)? yes again. Tagging messages? yes. Blazingly fast? you bet. The only thing I miss is keystroke filtering of messages.
That's one reason why I see things like Google Wave working out so well, I might be late to the gmail party, but plenty of folks have been using this as their primary mode of communication for a long long time.
Comments
In a word, I've used elm and pine, have used UNIX in the past, and I'm an Ubuntu user. I would presume you are aware of the somewhat cozy relations between Google and the Linux community (although Google is much too proprietary for some).
I simply see what you're saying as further evidence that Google is better plugged into the Linux world than many other well-known companies in the I.T. and computing industries.
I would have more to say, but such would drift to other subjects, such as musings on why you are supposedly late in joining the masses. I'll see if you decide to reply, I guess; but I'll say you certainly have my attention.