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You would probably find very useful two more packages, fetchmail to retrieve the emails from a POP3, IMAP or whatever server and procmail to sort the incoming emails into various mailboxes.
Below are some things that I've added to exmh that you might find useful.
exmh has support for displaying the sender's picture using a special header entry, X-Face. This header entry contains a compressed image of the sender. The biggest problem with X-Face images is that the images are black-white and the resolution is very low, just to keep the size of the transmitted image low enough.
Another possibility supported by exmh is to have the sender's picture specified in the so called picons database, which contains images associated with users and domains. The problem with this approach is that there must be a central authority that has to maintain the database containing all the images of all the users. Another inconvenient is that the picons database is very big (more than 20Mb compressed) and every user has to download it in order to have access to the pictures. If you change emails with your friends only it's very likely their images are not contained in the picons database. In these conditions updating the database on a regular basis may not worth enough, especially for users with limited Internet access.
Another idea would be to have the image of the sender specified as a URL in each message using a header entry. This eliminates the low resolution of X-Face images and the need to download a big database. This way the big database of images becomes a distributed database that's distributed across the Internet. Moreover it is accessed as needed, a person's image is not downloaded unless you receive a message from that person.
As far as I know, this feature was first implemented in an add-on to the NeXTSTEP's mailer, Mail.app. I implemented the same feature in exmh and it's fully integrated with the X-Face and picons images.
The name of the header entry that specifies the URL is X-Image-Url. Here's a small example of its usage:
X-Image-Url: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Monitor/7464/ovidiu.tiff
The currently supported protocols are HTTP and FTP. For FTP you must make the image available for anonymous ftp.
You can specify several types of images, the currently supported types are TIFF, JPEG, GIF, PBM, XBM, PNM, PPM, PGM and XPM. You need the pbmplus package installed on your machine though to support image types other than GIF, PPM, PGM, PBM and XPM. Search for 'pbmplus10dec91' if you don't have it already installed.
To maintain the compatibility with the people that are using NeXTSTEP, your picture should have a 64x64 resolution, although the image can have whatever resolution you like, it is anyway scaled to 48x48 before it's displayed in the exmh's window. A recommended practice is to keep it small so that the download time is not very big. Also people on NeXTSTEP prefer the image to be a TIFF image.
The image is cached in a directory in your home so the next time you read the person's emails, the image is taken from there.
A nice thing about this implementation in exmh is that downloading of the images happens in the background, so you are not forced to wait until the image is available. In addition, several images can be downloaded at the same time, there's no restriction on doing this. (A very annoying thing about the Mail.app's add-on implementation was that the downloading of images was blocking the whole application, you was not able to do anything with it during the download.)
You can add the new header field in the MH's message forms (components, forwcomps and replcomps) so that it is added automatically to all the messages you send (in a similar way with the X-faces field).
Take a look at a screenshot of exmh with this feature added. Here is the patch to the 2.0.2 version of exmh that implements this feature.
This patch creates an additional button on the Address DB Browser window, that allows you to manually enter a new email address. This is useful when you want to introduce a person's email address into the database before you receive message from him or her.