Reading emails in C#

I'm trying to write a program that will download emails in C#. I really don't care how I get them, as long as I do. Meaning, what I've checked online made it seem like a hard thing to do with code. So I figured I'd just let Outlook express do my work, and look through the inbox file OE uses in application data. I can even edit the registry to edit the users in outlook. All I'll have to do is have it run in the background in windows. The problem I've come to is that I cannot find where the password is saved for each user account (or 'identity'). Also, i'm assuming it will be encrypted, so I'd like to know what the algorithm is that's used. But then again, if anyone has a better idea, like a library thats easy to use and has built in pop3 or imap, I'd appreciate that as well.