I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but I think I'm finally fed up with (neo)mutt's inability to handle switching networks (ie, moving from home to work, or enabling and disabling VPN). Failures include just blocking, not interruptible with C-c; or claiming to look up the hostname and failing. Having to kill it leads to lost flags if I neglected to manually sync before moving.
@johns have you considered alpine or something like that? Or Thunderbird?
