Some people recommended I take a look at gnus as an IMAP client. I cheated, since I had most of my gnus setup already in place. Gnus is like a battleship – it is big and sturdy, but a bit slow. (It probably didn’t help that I ran it over a forwarded SSH X connection.) It has good IMAP support, it seems.
Gnus also has this excellent concept of “only show folders with unread
mails in them”, this means that I don’t get a zillion folders lying
about without anything interesting in them. Listing them is a short L
away, so it’s not a big issue to find them when you need them. Also,
autosubscribing to new groups is easy, just add ^nnimap to the
gnus-auto-subscribed-groups variable. It would be nicer if it used
the subscribed list from the server, but evidently, it’s not going to do
that.
I guess a screenshot is also in order, so you can see how well-ordered
gnus is, compared to wanderlust.
(And no comments on me having a lot on unread mail, gnus seems to act up a bit until I’ve entered all the folders with it, showing the total number of mails, not the unread number.)