Diving into mblaze, I think I’ve nearly* reached peek email geek.
Just a bunch of shell commands I can pipe together to search, list, view and reply to email (after syncing it to a local Maildir).
EXAMPLES at https://git.vuxu.org/mblaze/tree/README
So far I’m using most of the tools directly from the command line, but I might take inspiration from https://sr.ht/~rakoo/omail/ to make my workflow a bit more efficient.
*To get any closer, I think I’d have to hand-craft my own SMTP client or something.