Is there a command line mail program for Mac?
This sure takes me back to my university days...

Mutt has still got to be one of the best terminal-based mail clients out there. It's been around longer than I'd like to admit. It's available as a homebrew package:

&gt; brew info mutt
mutt 1.5.21
http://www.mutt.org/
Depends on: tokyo-cabinet
Not installed
http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/commits/master/Library/Formula/mutt.rb


Overall you'll get a much better experience using something like Mutt than you will with something like mail because it supports IMAP, POP3 and SMTP -- you don't have to learn sendmail or anything like that to get it to work with your accounts.

You can even use Mutt with Gmail if that's your bag. See this article for details on setting up Mutt to work with Gmail.

Pretty colours...