I don't know the mailbox API particularly well, but the fact the object offers all three of lock(), unlock() and close() as methods does imply a fair bit of inherent ambiguity.

One option would be to offer a module level "mailbox.locked()" API to handle the lock/unlock case, and then have native context management on the mailbox itself that was akin to "contextlib.closing".


(Note regarding contextlib.locked(): the reason we don't currently have that is because there's no consistent protocol for locking method names. acquire()/release() and lock()/unlock() would be the most popular pairings, so we could technically offer both "contextlib.acquired()" and "contextlib.locked()", but the duplication still seems a bit dubious to me)