Version 1.18 in Gentoo is of 27th November 2009, version 1.19-rc5 upstream is of 20th March 2012. Since there is a chance that updating to the new releases fixes three outstanding build issues, I am adding all three of those as blocked by this bug.
I'm now running perdition-1.19-rc5 (although in a not too complex setting) without problems. Most important for me, since 1.19-rc3 Thunderbird > 3.1 works with SSL/TLS connections! I had to modify the ebuild a bit because of the -rc5 annex to the package version and I'm not really sure whether I've kicked it the right way. I'm going to attach the new ebuild and a patch, though.
Created attachment 335722 [details] perdition-1.19_rc5.ebuild
Created attachment 335724 [details, diff] patch to the current perdition-1.18 ebuild
perdition-2.1 has been out for a year now. It still has build problems noted in bug 403459 which has since been fixed in the developer's hg. I'm attaching a new ebuild for version 2.1 as well as the patch extracted from hg. With these changes, perdition-2.1 works fine here.
Created attachment 395684 [details] perdition-2.1.ebuild
Created attachment 395686 [details, diff] patch for "conflicting types for ‘gdbm_version’" build error
are you willing to proxy maintain this? https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Proxy_Maintainers Thanks
Closing as obsolete as net-mail/perdition was removed by commit https://github.com/gentoo/gentoo/commit/f4eb7ab719dd1041628d72be14ff5571cb29b27b as part of bug #491372.