Well, a few hours in and I'm really beginning to think that the 's' in Soap should not stand for 'simple'
I'd expect to be able to throw a few lines of code together and get a response, but everything I'm seeing so far is insanely complicated considering I'm just trying to do the SQL equivalent of
Select Count(message) from account where account = 'thisone'
Time to checkout the zimbra source code I guess...