h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

"I bit the bullet and installed Ubuntu last week"

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"and Evolution"
You are never going to impress the 's like that, for email it MUST run in a terminal mutt, pine/alpine, elm , mailx, etc.
Pine/Alpine is probably the most user friendly of the bunch but will get you the least geek points (you will get a bonus if it's alpine), mutt the de-facto geek standard and mailx will get you a gold star

Remember the command line is your friend...

I'm not doing this to impress the geeks, I'm doing this to find the easiest and most idiot proof tools available for when the 'rents computer finally packs in and I have to get/build them a new one. They're not going to want or even need to muck around with the command line. Heck I don't even care if some of the stuff is closed source as long as it works and is easy for them to use, if it is for all I care the developers could eat babies and I wouldn't even bat an eyelid.

To be honest I'm with you on finding the easiest solutions and although I prefer a nice ethical open-source solution I'll used closed source if it's the right tool for the job.

As to email I use pine/alpine simple because I've being using for years and know it backwards.

I did use Mutt at uni on the compsci dept's old HP-UX terminals from time to time, and stuck with it a while when they replaced them with Win2K boxes running RedHat6/KDE via Hummingbird eXceed. Maybe once I've taken the baby steps again I might dabble in it once more.

...that's the spirit