I want to download my Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo mail.

I then want to parse through the data and pull out information.

I wanted to know can I use Windows Essential Mail to do this?

How does it store messages? 

Before, with Outlook, I could access the mail and parse through it

It was like having a massive text file (many GB) - but OK, no problem for something like Perl

I'm trying to use Thunderbird - but this is proving to be very very painful

Thanks

Omar