Where’s the peanut butter?!

I’ve tried two approaches to email and reading it remotely:

• Some big fat GUI (Outlook, etc.) stores the mail. If I want to
  access it remotely, I fire up a Remote Desktop connection and use
  that. This seems like overkill to me and I dislike it since I
  frequently don’t want or have the fast internet connection for loads
  of image caching when all I want is to read some email messages.
• Some trim CLI (gnus in xemacs) stores the mail. If I want to
  access it remotely, I fire up an SSH connection and use that. This
  hits the bandwidth level I’m after, but there are too many things I
  don’t know how to do in gnus that I honestly don’t think I’ll spend
  the time to learn and don’t feel I should be without (like easy,
  effective filtering or export/import).

So I think what I’m after is some way to have two applications access
the same mail backend. If I could, say, use Thunderbird to read mail
while I’m sitting at my computer and pine when I’m connected over ssh,
that would be splendid. But can I do this? Or what is the
recommended setup? I’m positive Linux users deal with this all the
time, right? Or do they all just use pine (or whatever) exclusively?