Thanks for the response.

I've created issues on aiosmtpd for both these things. There are much better ways of running the controller than threading, but that's a discussion for https://github.com/aio-libs/aiosmtpd/issues/160. I'll try and work on aiosmtpd in the future.

Regarding smtpd, please could you respond to:

> More generally I understand the idea of deprecated code that doesn't get updated to conform to latest conventions, but surely if the code exists in the standard lib. it should at least work as it was originally intended or be removed?

Of course, I know part of this is my wish to get my PR merged into cpython, but I really don't see any argument for leaving completely broken code in the standard library.

Surely either it should be removed before the next minor release or fixed?

I would say PureProxy could still be useful and should be left in place while MailmanProxy should be removed.