I'll agree that sometimes it's hard to understand priorities, say for
instance XMPP in general, or yes, prospective search.
All that aside, I'd encourage everyone to check out using Amazon's SES
service to send email via GAE. Their REST api works well and I
actually get fewer urlfetch timeouts using it than I got mail.send
timeouts sending with GAE. Also, their deliver ability is great! I
began using it when many GAE emails were flagged as spam via Yahoo.
Since then I have had just about 100% of my mail make it to inboxes.
Also, many threads on this list seem to indicate that GAE is not
planning on fixing their mail issues, and actually encourage users to
use a 3rd party for mail.