It depends on your preferences of course. Notmuch offers a way fast indexer you can’t get with traditional gui applications, but by itself it’s not pretty useful, however the integration with other tools makes it really powerful, with afew you get your personal tagging when messages arrive (filters), with alot you just get the email frontend. If you like the terminal experience, then you’d know you need something extra for smtp (writing emails) and there you have for example msmtp. It’s a matter of choice. I mentioned notmuch since the traditional approach to the terminal is plain neomutt, but there are alternatives. isync (mbsync) actually interacts well with neomutt but it also does it with notmuch, and neomutt can be used as a frontend for notmuch as well. A matter of choices.

The thing with solutions like thunderbird is that you have to adhere to their design decisions. For example I don’t like their librnp implementation, and I had to create alpm hooks on artix to keep updating such library with sequoia-octopus-librnp, not because I like rust (I don’t dislike it either), but because at least I can keep just one keyring, and thunderbird when not having a master password (the default) keeps its keyring unencrypted, and I pretty much see no reason not to use gnupg. So I decided I better kept using gnupg’s keyring and stuff. Integrating different tools designed for specific purposes you have more freedom of choice. At any rate that’s how unix was conceived, and you can choose to do it that way if you want.

Cool, it never came back to arch/artix, however I see it on aur. I actually don’t use gui for mpd, I use ncmpcpp, but good to know it has quite good gui frontend. ario is good as well, particularly if not much into Qt apps.

cantata is no longer maintained AFAIK, but as mentioned there are other clients such as ario, which on arch/artix it is build on gtk3, not gtk2

How about isync + notmuch + afew + alot + msmtp? gpg decryption not directly supported but using alot’s pipeto it can be used to decrypt messages. As using notmuch as indexer it’s flow is pretty similar/compatible to/with gmail.

It would have been better to self host forgejo, rather than trusting a cloud git service using forgejo. But to be honest, its TOS, as well as the sourcehut’s TOS which I even like it better, sound way better than GH’s…