'Disconnected'?

   $ apt-cache search mbox | tail -1
   libetpan16 - mail handling library

Looks pretty connected to me.

That's not quite the same, from man apt-cache(8):

search regex... search performs a full text search on all available package lists for the POSIX regex pattern given, see regex(7). It searches the package names and the descriptions for an occurrence of the regular expression and prints out the package name and the short description, including virtual package names.(...) if --names-only is given then the long description is not searched, only the package name is.

Interestingly aptitude search and apt-cache search --names-only doesn't give quite the same results on my box (apart from the fact that aptitude also lists 32bit "i386" packages). But they're almost the same.

As for the names:

    $ aptitude search mbox|grep -v i386 -c
    24

    $ aptitude search mbox|tail -1
    p   yahoo2mbox - Retrieve and store Yahoo! Groups messages

Gah. Well, apply it to the first library named mbox that is not actually related to the mbox file format. My only point is that there are a lot of things called mbox. I don't see why we're singling out academics for criticism. People overload good names.

The first person to make something mbox that wasn't the format is the main culprit, but people after him are certainly not blameless either.