How to handle asyncore within a class in python, without blocking anything?

Coming from the other question asyncore.loop doesn't terminate when there are no more connections

I think you are slightly over thinking the threading. Using the code from the other question, you can start a new thread that runs the asyncore.loop by the following code snippet:

import threading

loop_thread = threading.Thread(target=asyncore.loop, name="Asyncore Loop")
# If you want to make the thread a daemon
# loop_thread.daemon = True
loop_thread.start()

This will run it in a new thread and will keep going till all asyncore channels are closed.

The solution provided might not be the most sophisticated solution, but it works reasonable and has been tested.

First of all, the matter with asyncore.loop() is that it blocks until all asyncore channels are closed, as user Wessie pointed out in a comment before. Referring to the smtp example mentioned earlier, it turns out that smtpd.SMTPServer inherits from asyncore.dispatcher (as described on the smtpd documentation), which answers the question of which channel to be closed.

Therefore, the original question can be answered with the following updated example code:

class CustomSMTPServer(smtpd.SMTPServer):
    # store the emails in any form inside the custom SMTP server
    emails = []
    # overwrite the method that is used to process the received 
    # emails, putting them into self.emails for example
    def process_message(self, peer, mailfrom, rcpttos, data):
        # email processing


class MyReceiver(object):
    def start(self):
        """Start the listening service"""
        # here I create an instance of the SMTP server, derived from  asyncore.dispatcher
        self.smtp = CustomSMTPServer(('0.0.0.0', 25), None)
        # and here I also start the asyncore loop, listening for SMTP connection, within a thread
        # timeout parameter is important, otherwise code will block 30 seconds after the smtp channel has been closed
        self.thread =  threading.Thread(target=asyncore.loop,kwargs = {'timeout':1} )
        self.thread.start()     

    def stop(self):
        """Stop listening now to port 25"""
        # close the SMTPserver to ensure no channels connect to asyncore
        self.smtp.close()
        # now it is save to wait for the thread to finish, i.e. for asyncore.loop() to exit
        self.thread.join()

    # now it finally it is possible to use an instance of this class to check for emails or whatever in a non-blocking way
    def count(self):
        """Return the number of emails received"""
        return len(self.smtp.emails)        
    def get(self):
        """Return all emails received so far"""
        return self.smtp.emails
    ....

So in the end, I have a start and a stop method to start and stop listening on port 25 within a non-blocking environment.