What's the state of the art for mail?

[kj <socyl@987jk.com>]

After all these years good ol' RMAIL's limitations are *finally*
getting to me.  I've stuck with it mostly out of inertia, and
because it works well with Emacs.

My main concerns are to be able to use Emacs (or a faithful Emacs-like
interface) to read my mail on Linux, to have no problems with MIME
attachments, and no BABYL!  (Availability of a Debian package is
always a plus.)

Thanks for your suggestions!

kj

PS: I'm a bit leery about MH, mostly because a friend of mine who
has used exmh for almost 10 years tells me that its MIME handling
is a little bit long in the tooth.  In particular, she noted that
one needs to jump through hoops to make the quoting of messages
that have MIME attachments work right.
-- 
NOTE: In my address everything before the period is backwards.