Hello python-ideas, My most recent project lead me down a path that eventually ended up at a new implementation of imaplib based on [RFC-3501]. Although I started the project by gradually adding functionality to the existing IMAP4 library, some of the features that I required simply could not be merged in (without breaking everything). As a result, I wrote my own version of the library, which incorporates all existing functionality of imaplib and includes many of my own improvements. I wrote a PEP-style readme file that describes all the details of why the library was written and how it works, which is available from my mercurial repository: http://hg.mxcrypt.com/python/imaplib2/raw-file/tip/README The same repository also contains the library code and an example script that you can run if you have access to an IMAP4 server: http://hg.mxcrypt.com/python/imaplib2/ Is there any interest in adding my code to a future version of Python 3.x standard library? - Max