[leif]

You can use alpine and mutt just fine with remote imap and smtp, including gmail. It's not hard.

Apart from "they look old" (which is a fake argument), what about console mail clients makes them feel as though they aren't designed for the modern era? Sure, they don't look like other mail clients, but that's as much other clients' fault as theirs. What exactly about their UI, intrinsically, do you dislike? Or do you just love the mouse too much to give it up?