This weekend I started working on upgrading Hep's messaging library. My goal is to end up with a nice abstraction layer for working with messages, that will be useful for other projects as well as Hep. As part of this I'm splitting all the file-format bits (that deal with reading and writing RSS/mailbox/text/html files) into a seperate "parsers" library that doesn't required Twisted or dealing with events. So hopefully that might be useful for somebody.
Once the library is upgrade is done (and it's coming along quite well already), it should be possible to add NNTP support to Hep in just a few hours (thanks to Twisted's excellent news module).