something i did back in the VB6 days, VB6 POP3 email http://www.vbforums.com/showthread.php?t=374892
just remember it is in VB6. should be able to give you the basics of retrieving email from server. look up the specifications of POP3: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1939.txt
Also, remember this is just one of the many specifications, and I used only POP3 and SMTP with a smattering of IMAP