Some of my problems with Mutt are a result of having occasionally to use Hebrew. On Linux, Mutt will work passably in any terminal and permit the reading of Hebrew emails. It needs only to have “bidiv” installed and defined in .muttrc. The limitations are that: (a) RTL subject lines will be backward (b) Both rtl and ltr emails will appear on the left-hand side of the page, (c) an rtl enabled editor must be used, and (d) Some email clients, such as Yahoo and Fastmail deal poorly with rtl plain-text messages. They will be aligned in the left margin with end of sentence punctuation on the wrong side. Messages that contain single ltr words will appear with the sentence order garbled.
If one wants a more complete multilingual environment for Mutt, there seems to be only the mlterm multilingual console. In mlterm, it is necessary to disable bidiv in .muttrc. Then rtl subject lines will be correct, reading of rtl emails will be easier, and it is possible to choose from a number of different console text editors such as Emacs, Vim and Mined. Getting the fonts right for Hebrew seems to be more difficult than for Arabic. I spent a lot of time playing with that until choosing a size 20 font, which was a lot more legible. So Mlterm is the way to go for rtl. However I ran into problems. Mlterm seems less stable than Gnome Terminal, especially with console text editors. Every editor I have tried causes a terminal to crash at odd times, such as when scrolling to the bottom of the screen. So I’ve given up with all of them and gone back to Gui editors that are capable of writing in Hebrew. Gedit seems to be the most successful so far. I’ve yet to try Gvim or the gui version of Emacs