I banned Cygwin quite a while ago because of too many instabilities (versions of the dll),
and the awful stuff of being obliged to "mount" drives and so on.
Windows is not Unix. If I want Unix, I install some Ubuntu in a VM or on a spare machine.
Under Windows, I use gnuwin32 whenever I can and mingw/msys sometimes
(just to compile the trunk org-mode at the moment, because it is easier than write msvc makefiles)
Back to w3m, rendering html this way may be ok, but it remains quite slow, it make emacs busy
for something that chrome is designed to do quickly. So I use chrome and gmail. Once you find that
you can program some stuff with scripts in google apps, I do almost what I was used to with Gnus.
I can even compose messages in emacs if needed (using the edit server chrome extension for emacs).
Well everyone has to find his best setup.
Sorry for having been out of topic
(hopefully not out of interest for everyone).
Fabrice