[cylinder714]

I used the text-based Pine (now Alpine) on Windows as my MUA a while back, and enjoyed it quite a bit. It let me use Vim as my editor and Par as a powerful text formatter. Those, along with its speed and keyboard friendliness made working in a Windows environment bearable for this old Xenix hand. And no, I didn't have to set up any mail servers to make it work, I just used existing SMTP and IMAP servers at work.

>This whole idea of a self-contained MUA application goes against the general UNIX-y paradigm

I don't understand this at all, or your concerns about buffer overflows and "quickly testing hypotheses regarding MUA design." Text-based MUAs in particular are very solid and fast; find one you like and quit worrying about irrelevant issues. Or, learn Emacs and use one of the mail clients it supports (or write your own!).

—signed, former tech support for Z-Mail and text-based Z-Mail Lite