I am very happy to see Mailgun work towards sane API's for their email offering. I'm in the process of building an internal API for external IMAP accounts for http://snapier.com/ and it has been, well, rather exasperating... I can only imagine the frustration of trying to manage real infrastructure with such obtuse standards.
I'm hoping to open source our IMAP client wrapper soon, as it is a lot simpler than the standard library in Python.
In a lot of cases the Python standard libraries are just a wrapper that allows you to use a protocol without the need for socket-level programming, but not much above that in terms of abstraction.
It makes sense though. This allows several third parties to develop different interfaces that can iterate faster than something in the standard library can by providing them with a stable base.
I'm hoping to open source our IMAP client wrapper soon, as it is a lot simpler than the standard library in Python.