questions about text-based e-mail

[aerospace1028 at hotmail.com]

Hello,
I have been running archlinux for a few months now and enjoy the availability of speakup.  Although I primarily run in the gnome desktop, I like being able to quickly get access to the text consoles without having to go through the hassle of pulling out my braillenote and juggling between the keyboard and the braille-display.

Thank you very much to the developers, maintainers and contributors to speakup.

One area I am interested in exploring, is shifting from thunderbird to the text-console (either with alpine, or mutt I presume).

I'm not sure which is easier to learn as a beginner, alpine or mutt?  I don't actually use thunderbird for e-mail as much as a news reader (through port 119: nntp).  I subscribe to a newsgroup with several sub-forums; I like to connect and download the new unread messages to my computer then read the messages off-line and compose my replies and send them to a queue to be sent out next time I connect to the newsgroup again.  Is this easily accomplishable with either alpine or mutt?

Also, are there any special settings in speakup I should be aware of when operating either alpine or mutt?  I think I read on www.stormdragon.us that it's recommended to have speakup in highlight tracking mode (toggled with the caps-lock + CTRL + 8 keystroke on a laptop).  Are there any other environment variables or speakup switches that enhance the ability to interact with text-based e-mail/news-readers?

I consider myself a comfortable beginner with the text-consoles and speakup, so please be patient as I try to expand my skill-set here.  This is more complex then anything I've tried on the command-line before.  I realize there'll be a bit of a learning curve as I transition from the graphical environment I'm more familiar with to the console.  I figure I'll have some more questions as I get my feet wet.

Thank you:-)