I recently put back on my old geezer hat and switched to GNUS for email at work. I yearn for the days that all email was simple text and people actually trimmed long reply chains. Inline responses were also easier in text.
That said, I do realize this is mainly for marketing emails. Or things that need to show charts and the like. I don't instantly despise the idea. But it does amuse me that much of what makes the space difficult, is a combination of a ton of things that were designed to make the space easy. (Though, I question who the target was for most of the ease. Seems many features are made specifically to make it easier to market to me. Not for me to use email.)
One of the best decisions I made was to use a cli email client. Parsing email is much faster and eaiser. And I don't have to look at spam^H^H^H^Hmarketing emails any more.
I've been meaning to use Emacs for my e-mail for quite some time now, but I can't get myself to jump through all the hurdles required to get reliable access to GMail.
In Emacs I use mu4e pointed at a local Maildir and sync against an imap server using mbsync (switched away from offlineimap because of UID validity issues, which is apparently offlineimap's only method of tracking messages, may be a flaw with microsoft's imap implementation, but offlineimap can't handle it).
mbsync needs (setq mu4e-change-filenames-when-moving t) so it can properly handle file moves.
Haven't used it against gmail, but because microsoft wants you using outlook only, imap is a bit buggy so you need to set PipelineDepth 1 in your .mbsyncrc IMAPAccount block because it seems that the microsoft imap server has account global variables so multiple threads/connections will step on each other.
And perversely, (setq mu4e-view-prefer-html t) has to be set because many rich html composing clients will send a text version that's completely blank, leaving you staring at a blank body if the client defaulted to text only.
You'll have to find a html rendering command that works for you. Something like (setq mu4e-html2text-command "html2text -utf8 -nobs -width 72")
Or google around for custom commands other people have published.
I haven't hooked up to gmail, yet. I can't imagine it is harder than hooking up to exchange, though. For that GNUS really hasn't been that bad. I quite enjoy it.
That said, I do realize this is mainly for marketing emails. Or things that need to show charts and the like. I don't instantly despise the idea. But it does amuse me that much of what makes the space difficult, is a combination of a ton of things that were designed to make the space easy. (Though, I question who the target was for most of the ease. Seems many features are made specifically to make it easier to market to me. Not for me to use email.)