I was born at the end of the baby boom, we came of age in the late 70's and early 80's, when the country was going through a backlash against the counterculture and political tumoil of the late 60's and early 70's. Gone was the optimism and hope for a better world replaced by greed. Everyone was trying to get MBA or Law degrees. Engineering, science, the arts? Most people we're interested. As my age group entered the workforce and started and gained experience they only seemed to care about making money, and as much money as fast as possible. And remember, it wasn't only Wall Street. The whole Dot Com boom was awash from get-rich-quick speculative investing from the Boomers and managed by the late boomers. The whole cynical stupidity of the browser wars was driven by assholes to make the web into electric metaphors for things that the Boomers knew how to monetize.

The visionaries behind the Web were outgunned by the banal greed of Bill Gates who is a classic Robber Baron, who is now in the stage of life where he is trying to buy redemption with good deeds. And even then, his good deeds are making him money. I've heard this from a number of NGOs who have worked with his foundation. They don't give unless they can get. And then we had the fake hippie Steve Jobs who helped spark the PC revolution and then spent the last half of his life doing everything in his power to crush it and turn general computing devices that could be customized and extended to fit you into consumer electronics that forced people to do things the way that Jobs wanted you to do.

For every Woz there were a hundred or more Jobs. Woz and those like him, Steward Brand is an early boomer, Linus is a later boomer but they are the rare exceptions that prove the rule. So yeah, the late boomers, we really did and do suck.

I started started out using Pine, way way back when, then switched to the email client on my NeXT Color Slab. I replaced the NeXT box with an SGI Indy and used their built in email client. But when that died and I moved over to Linux I tried out Emacs Gnus which was fantastic and used that for 10 years. The only drawback to Gnus is search and I finally bit the bullet and moved from Gnus to Emacs Mu4e. It's not as powerful as Gnus, but it has a powerful index engine Mu that runs outside of Emacs and the Emacs client Mu4e is fast, clean and does pretty much everything that I need in a client. My mail is in a Google Apps account under my own domain so I grab email from Google using IMAP using mbsync, and then Mu indexes and syncs. I run this setup on two different machines, one in the office and one at home. Last year I had to split my time between three job sites and used a laptop as well. These tools allow me to integrate email into my entire workflow, I can link to specific emails in document, my task lists and manage issues on our GitLab server that is integrated with code in my git repos, notes and drafts of papers and blog posts (though I have't blogged in a while)

If I don't have access to any of my boxes running Mu4e I can always slum it and use the Gmail web client, it's not nice, because it isn't a good fit with my tool chain and work flow, but in a pinch it will do if I need to see an email on a mobile phone or someone else's computer.

I have two screens, the big one runs Emacs with two windows side by side, with Mu4e running in one and elfeed (an Emacs RSS reader) in the other. Any links open in Firefox running in the other monitor.

Honorable mentions go to Anything which is another Emacs email client and Mutt.

Hackers were not called Phreakers. Hackers were called hackers, which had nothing to do with malicious activities. It was the mainstream media that twisted the term because they didn't understand the difference between hacking, cracking and whatever the idiot script kiddies thought they were cutting and pasting at the time.... When I was starting out in Unix in the 80's you weren't allowed to call yourself a hacker unless someone who was a master of their craft called you that first. I'll never forget the first time that my mentor, a hacker working for Motorolla in Hong Kong introduced me at a conference in front of a large audience as a Unix Hacker. It was, and should still be a point of pride. Hacking is a method and philosophy of learning and problem solving that flattens hierarchies and cuts across disciplinary borders whose roots date back to the days of WWII project based weapons research and development.

The mobile phone system is terrible in the States. It's expensive, you get charged for receiving and sending calls, 3G is bad, and 4G is spotty at best.
I get better mobile service out here were I live in Vientiene, Laos and Phnom Penh Cambodia! My parents in boston complain about how expensive it is to call me, but it's as cheap for me to call the States as it is to make a local call.

That said, when I do have to go to the States I use a T-mobile prepaid and maintain a Google-Voice number in between.

I suggest you rethink moving back to the States.

Mobile phones will be the least of your disappointments.