Parsing MIME Help

I hope some webmail expert can help me out here. I am currently battling the problem with parsing multiple encodings in the emails, such as base64. I was wondering if anyone had any advise/experience they could share with me in dealing with the horrors of email >.< I am currently using python and the imaplib. My big problem is that my parser works for most, but then fails on others. It also gets very frustrating when there are multiple encodings in the actual message itself. I am wanting this to be a quick and dirty script to extract the email message in plain text. But then some messages can contain a header in the body of the message. I have read through RFC 3501(IMAP), 5322(Internet Message Format) and skimmed the 4 MIME RFCs. Anyone here an expert with MIME that can give me some pointers? My code gets more and more garbled and I eventually throw it away >.< The seemingly endless numbers of encodings are taking their toll on me T_T