"It is also possible that your mail will be on some sort of webmail system like google mail. If that is the case then you will have to write or find code to scrape the website using modules such as HTML::TreeBuilder or WWW::Mechanize::Firefox, though in the case of Google, you can configure your account to be accessible via IMAP."

Webmail systems such as Gmail prohibit scraping/automating their web interfaces in their terms of use. For access they allow POP3 and SMTP. http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=13287.