I've been working on a new package for dealing with message objects, including mime messages. Mostly this is for use in Mailman, but they will be generally useful. I want to eventually replace essentially what's in rfc822.py, multifile.py, mimetools.py, and taking some of the best ideas of stuff like mimecntl.py.
The basic idea is that I've separated the object model from parsing and generating. That way you can drop in different parsers or generators, and you can manipulate the object model independently. Conceptually a message object has a set of headers and a payload. The payload can be just a string or a message object, or a list of those. Then you can add/remove headers with semantics similar (but slightly different) to rfc822, and you can add/remove payload objects.
You pass a root message object to the generator, and it spits out text suitable for delivery via smtplib.py. It knows that message objects w/ list payloads are multiparts. The parser on the other hand, takes text and spits out a message object tree. parsing->object tree->generator is idempotent.
For composition, there is a base class that knows about content-type: headers, and subclasses for common subtypes (image/*, text/*, etc.). Cool things you can do with this are: take a mime message, find the image subparts, rip them out and post them to a webdav server, replacing the image/* part with a text/* part that contains just a url to the image; throw away all binary subparts, reordering the containing multipart, etc. etc.
It's not complete right now and I won't be able to post anything until I get back my internet connection, but stay tuned. It'll be distrib'd as a distutils package so it'l be easy to install. I'm just not sure what to call it (always the most important thing to decide. :) The two I've come up with so far are "pantomime" and "mimeo".
Cheers, -Barry