i would like to programmatically access via python all the mail that exists on a Mac OS X system, which is received by the built in "Mail.app" program. are there friendly apis for accessing the mail as stored by that program? My impression is that it's not just a text format and that it might be more complicated. thanks.
Mail.app stores messages as .emlx files, which is an undocumented format AFAIK. But you could convert .emlx files to the standard mbox format (using this) and then process them with the mailbox module.