I was hoping to find an email client that had Vi or emacs keybindings
in order to speed up my response [and reduce time] to emails, along
with some way of saving important emails to disk drive. So far TB is
the only one that provides saving to disk through ImportExportTools.
Using the maildir format i was hoping some of the unix ones might have
what i was looking for. I tried claws but didn't like it. Balsa is one
not mentioned often and that is a nice layout... should be worthy of
the frequent package description phrase 'fits nicely into the ubuntu
desktop' (i find it rather irritating!).

As i said before TB with the plugin muttator will be what i'll end up
with. No one has ever said what they do with important emails that
they want to keep... I've no complaints about webmail googlemail -
just that i want to speed up response, gmail only allows 100 messages
per screen which is slow i find.