While what you went through and felt is valid, I was able to find, in LuaRocks, libraries or Lua interfaces to libraries implementing everything on that wish list. In more detail:

a sqlite database

https://luarocks.org/modules/tami5/sqlite

https://luarocks.org/modules/dougcurrie/lsqlite3

3DES encryption

https://luarocks.org/modules/starius/luacrypto

https://github.com/somesocks/lua-lockbox/blob/master/lockbox...

an SMTP client

https://luarocks.org/modules/luarocks/lua-smtps