Why would anyone use mutt when you can have 'local' (ie on a machine you ssh into) Maildirs? That's one of the selling points for using mutt. Imap sucks, it's just something we have to put up with for lack of something better, but I've never searched mail as fast as when I could just grep for what I needed.

I use Thunderbird and it's installed on multiple machines where I have it configured to access the same email account via IMAP. I never really had a problem with out of sync mail and searches are done locally on the machine rather than on the server. I don't have it configured to use Maildir, but the files that store messages are in plain text and I could use grep on them if I wanted to.