I'd second that. The basics are easy, but there will be constant niggles relating to RFC2047 header-parsing, MIME-issues, and issues relating to handling some

I'd second that. The basics are easy, but there will be constant niggles relating to RFC2047 header-parsing, MIME-issues, and issues relating to handling some crazy mails that people will send. I've written my mail-clients in C++, but I suspect Perl, Python, or Ruby, would be fast enough with the massive caveat that you need to have decent libraries/interfaces for the low-level parts.