Command Line Mail Client To Coexist With KMail?

I use KMail 1.3.1 under X but would like to check my mail remotely on the command line as well. With a previous version of KMail, I ran Pine once and mangled all of my inboxes in KMail. Does anyone use the latest KMail with Pine or Mutt (or ?...) sharing the same ~/Mail directory? Is there a better way to go about a solution besides sharing this way (eg, does this sound like a job for IMAP)? Thanks, David A. Riggs -- 5:43pm up 3 days, 45 min, 2 users, load average: 0.11, 0.05, 0.01