I think it's an excellent class contribution.
I would prefer a python based solution, as I would rather go forward learning python. There are also some other interesting python technologies out there that become interesting to the OACS and AOLserver world. There's pywx, and I'm not sure of the status of that, but holds the potential to let us efficiently do python in aolserver, and there's mailman, a very popular python based mailing list manager.
That said, I can't point you to any python based webmail packages to start from. But just think how much easier it will make to port zope modules over. Kidding.
