"What do you look for in an email program? You may find it in Mutt, an easy-to-use text-based messaging client. Here's all you need to know to get started with Mutt.
"To read mail from a POP account using Mutt, you need to have a mail transfer agent such as Sendmail and a mail delivery agent such as Procmail installed, as well as a program that can connect to a POP server and download your emails, such as fetchmail. Most standard *nix systems, have all these programs installed..."