Its been a while since I used Mutt extensively (lets say about 15 years) but IIRC you could use $ to sync the changes, though you'd have to do it manually.

You can, but you have to do that manually while you still have your connection. I've gotten into the habit of doing that frequently while triaging mail, but I'd rather not have to.

That's what drove me initially to aerc + notmuch

That works? One of the main reasons I'm considering switching from aerc to mutt/something else is because IMAP keeps disconnecting.

Seems like the number 3 item you would want to nail down in a mail-client. But I'm sure it is just me that haven't looked into it yet. Unfortunately I just can't find time for it for the time being.

I think it is much lower on the list for terminal-first users than that, as they use Aerc or Mutt solely for reading and writing mail on the local machine and rely on other programs to sync the incoming and outgoing mail with the external mail server. I use Aerc, but also msmtp for sending and mbsync for receiving mail, for instance. This aligns more with the Unix philosophy of combining multiple small programs that do only one thing well into a personalized workflow.

I don't want to debug multiple programs when mail isn't getting sent or received. I don't want to have programs that think they've sent mail when they've just handed off responsibility to some other program. And, closely related, I don't want to have incidents where mail isn't getting sent and I don't know that.

I'd like a mail client as capable as mutt, but that also works whether I'm online or not, handles mail sync automatically in the background while I start processing those mails, lets me browse and search and draft responses offline, and has a built-in idea of "has that mail been sent yet?" rather than just saying "sent" the moment a mail goes into another queue the client doesn't manage without giving any status for when it actually gets sent. And all that while also leaving mail on the server so that other mail clients such as K-9 mail on my phone (which can do all those things) can also process mail.

Sometimes I like "programs that do one thing well". But doing mail well involves taking full responsibility for mail.

>I'd like a mail client as capable as mutt, but that also works whether I'm online or not, handles mail sync automatically in the background while I start processing those mails, lets me browse and search and draft responses offline, and has a built-in idea of "has that mail been sent yet?" rather than just saying "sent" the moment a mail goes into another queue the client doesn't manage without giving any status for when it actually gets sent. And all that while also leaving mail on the server so that other mail clients such as K-9 mail on my phone (which can do all those things) can also process mail..

FWIW aerc does have all this built-in, but also offers the possibility to just hand off responsibility to external programs. As far as I'm concerned, I use the built-in email sender. Unfortunately, the built-in emails fetcher does not work well with poor internet connection or offline. That's why I use offlineimap to sync maildirs every 5 mins, and notmuch is just the icing on the cake for fast search/indexing.

I don't buy that. Either it is important or you don't have the feature at all. The Unix philosophy isn't to do everything and some things poorly and let the users figure out which parts are good and which are bad that needs a separate application to do it properly.

This, and with notmuch it's awesome (the search is close to if not better than Gmail's one). I find myself less relying on the web interface of Gmail, except for HTML emails sigh. I know I can just install socksify, but it isn't packaged in my distro, and I already manage too much programs installed from source. I might write a blog post about this setup one day.