More on rss2maildir.py...
Just to confirm, yes, I do know of rss2email - it has the unfortunate side effect of needing an MTA configured to process the rss feeds and seperate them in to seperate maildirs, basically I wanted something that would write straight to the maildir for me because then I don't have to think about the config for the MTA on each machine that I want to use it on.
Thanks to Martin for the suggestion of pandoc, I'll take a look at that over the next few days to see if it'll make the "plain text" generation slightly neater than the current HTMLParser based code.