I understand your frustration with the learning curve. I think a lot of it is just that Zope is so flexible and powerful that it would be overwhelming even if you had all the documentation in front of you.
Sure would be nice to suffer from that problem :-)
Another thing I've been doing is to download the mail list archives, save them as text,
The Archives *are* the Zope documentation right now.
and then use at text indexer (I'm using the 30-day evaluation version of dtSearch - www.dtsearch.com, in my opinion the best around) to search for answers to my questions. I really wish they'd put the archives into a zcatalog so they could be searched using boolean logic, but until then, this is one of the most powerful ways to find answers (and code) to your questions.
Seems like this would actually be a superb product - "mailing list archiver". Threading in particular would be a great plus. Which brings me finally (see i wasn't just being crass) to the question and point : for Zope to be used in groupware (or in the 'mailing list archiver'), it needs to integrate with email seemlessly - as in, mail can be sent to the server (not to a person) for agents to handle. So, what's the best method of making this happen ? Send to a traditional email address (eg. using qmail or sendmail on the server) then pipe to a python script which then does what ? seems a bit yukky.
Gradually, I've been able to put a lot of answers together between the documentation I'm accumulating, searching the list archives using dtSearch, experimenting with Zope (versions and the interface really encourage trying things out), reading the source (Python is surprisingly readable), and (last ditch) emailing the list, where I've invariably gotten great help.
Looks like 500 of us are doing duplicating this :) Reminds me of the Livewire list in '96 <yikes> chas