Mailr: an open-source webmail client with Gmail-like conversations
this is interesting, but in a way it's also really scary from my quick look at it it  seems that is sql to store the emails. any reason to use that over mbox, or milder, which you can then easily index?it also implements a small imap client(which may work fine for just reading gmail, but imap is a scary thing, everyone uses it a little differently)https://github.com/naspeh/mailr/blob/master/mailr/syncer.pythat said i guess it's a nice example for writing a mail client in python.you might want to use mailpile which had it's first release a while back:http://mailpile.isbut even for that, if you don't care about fancy guis, you're probably still better off running mutt, imap, mu on a shell you have somewhereedit: i didn't pay enough attention, as was mentioned it's using imaplib, which is the same library offlineimap uses. i do believe though that a lot the work that happens is how people deal with the rfcs. i remember reading about frustrations of the offlineimap author with different servers, and clients. but basically imaplib itself is just a basic protocol implementation, everything else happens on top of it.and while you can indeed easily store your terabytes of data in postgresql and you can easily setup full text search, it's still much more portable and easily to handle backup and syncing purposes in different formats. Archiveopteryx looks interesting though, so thanks for the hint. if i never write a service to handle mails for other people i'll revisit it.