Apparently, moving the WH email to Microsoft Exchange caused them no end of trouble. How astonishing:

Brook Colongelo, the chief information officer for the Executive Office of the President's (EOP's) Office of Administration, said the EOP has used EMC Corp.’s EmailXtender as its e-mail storage system for its unclassified network since Obama took office. Colangelo said in the letter that the system:

* Is a secure, single, centrally managed e-mail archive.
* Automatically captures messages, including those sent or received via BlackBerry mobile handsets in near real time,

An overly long video from the recent I/O conference, but about seven minutes in you start to get a sense of what this is about.

It's early on, and there's a lot of hype happening here, but it seems like Wave is blending elements of email and instant-messaging and twitter-style communication together, and if I'm right about that, I might just fall in love with the thing.

The email package is a library for managing email messages, including MIME and other RFC 2822-based message documents. It subsumes most of the functionality in several older standard modules such as rfc822, mimetools, multifile, and other non-standard packages such as mimecntl. It is specifically not designed to do any sending of email messages to SMTP (RFC 2821), NNTP, or other servers; those are functions of modules such as smtplib and nntplib.