In followup, I'll post some information that I gleaned while addressing the task of maintaining the same messages on separate computers
1) When choosing an email provider make sure they provide imap support. My provider, Earthlink, only provides pop3. I 'm stuck with Earthlink in the near future.
2) The question has been
posed to the Mutt developers in the past and to provide uidl support in the fetch mail function would require an additional cache.
3)
Getmail with nmh will provide the functionality of maintaining the same emails on multiple computers.
nmh was needed to maintain backwards compatibility with my prior email client, Slypheed/Claws Mail. With the mh format, it is critical to have a
.mh_sequences in the inbox directory, otherwise mutt will not open the
folder.
The mutt documentation seems to push for either Maildir or mbox formats. I liked the idea of having each email consist of a file rather than having one massive file as in
mbox.