Morten says:
If this sounds interesting, send me an email. =)
Is this one OK?
I'm developing an Outlook/WorldPilot replacement which is much more modular in design. It will be released under the GPL. When and where I don't know yet. It stores messages in 'pure' ZODB format (that is, the entire message is broken down and stored in various parts of the object), with _all_ the information from the original message stored, in a structured and indexable way.
Watching the growing pains of an recently installed IMAP based Corporate E-Mail system makes me just a little queasy about using ZODB for mass storage. Volume is a very real problem, and Zope has it's own limits that must be considered. I know it's formidable, but you may find the ZPatterns stuff useful. One of the goals is to make it "easy" to swap out one storage for another. At first glance it strikes me as fairly straightforward to capture most of the relevant data that accompanies an E-Mail as RDBM "fields". Of course, a text blob, ZODB, or files may be more appropriate for the actual message content, and certainly for included files. ZODB is such a cool thing, but I'm still struggling with deciding what's best held as native ZODB "objects" vs. other possibilities. ZPatterns eases that quandary by making the choice flexible, and easy to "refactor" (fix!) if / when you decide you "got it wrong". You might also check out the companion products "ExtFile" and "ExtImage" http://www.zope.org/Members/MacGregor/ExtFile which allow storage of "file" type data directly on the file system, yet keep related metadata in ZODB, for ZCataloging, etc.
We're also including support for signing/verifying messages, with GnuPG.
Even Better! Good Luck, Jerry S.