Mutt is based on elm (and written by the same author) so will feel familiar to people who've used elm.
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Mutt has the ability to display messages by related discussion ("threads") rather than the more commonly seen (and jumbled) date sent. When reading through unread messages the effect is some topical consistency -- a great boon with high volume mailing lists or personal discussions. See the
(Internally mutt uses the In-Reply-To: and References: headers which are set automatically when replying by decent mail clients; it falls back by default on Subject:).
The "limit" command l filters the display of messages. Mutt's documentation doesn't make a big deal of "limit" nor introduces it until well into the manual but it's one of mutt's real gems and is well worth learning early.For example, paul.makepeace searches on subject, author and email address limiting the display to those that match. make would return at least as many results. All searches are case insensitive, and are regular expressions so ^, $, . (period) etc have special meanings. (Learn about 4.1 Regular Expressions.)
Often this method is enough but it's possible to limit on more specific patterns using a code prefixed with ~ (tilde). Here are some more examples: