Simon,
As Don says, OpenForce is working on revamping the spam module for dotLRN, and to meet the requirements of another client. We're going to be adding some basic templating, so that messages can be personalized, and some features to track clickthroughs from links embedded in the messages. My apologies for the lack of detail here -- we're really just starting on this.
However, having reviewed the current spam module, I'm inclined to agree with you that the current module isn't really worth maintaining, and we won't be building the new system from it. There's not a lot of functionality there.
We're also going to be building this on top of a new mail system. The current acs-mail is pretty complicated and painful to use and maintain. I've started on an acs-mail-lite package that will be checked into OpenACS next week. At first, this package will only provide a simple ns_sendmail like API, but enqueues messages in the database to provide transactionality and reliability. If anyone has any ideas for how to extend this package to provide more powerful facilities without becoming the beast that is acs-mail, I'd love to hear them.
