My terminal email client https://github.com/alexpdp7/epistle/ has reached its first milestone; I think I can do all the mail reading that I need (including viewing .docx/.pdf attachments on the terminal).

I just realized it has 0 dependencies. This would "prove" the "batteries-includedness" of Python, but it cheats; epistle does much of the heavy lifting with external programs: notmuch, LibreOffice, and pdftotext.

You also need to get mail to maildir format (I use mbsync).