Zed Shaw's Lamson project (http://lamsonproject.com http://lamsonproject.com) has some solid code for handling most of the messiest parts of dealing with email

Zed Shaw's Lamson project (http://lamsonproject.com http://lamsonproject.com) has some solid code for handling most of the messiest parts of dealing with email - bounces, unicode, etc. It's structured in a way that makes it very easy to snip out the parts you want to use without necessarily using all the rest.