Access Gmail Inbox

Does anyone know how to write a program that is able to log into my gmail account and download the body of emails?  I was able to write code that sent emails from gmail since it uses smtp but retreiving them has proven to be rather tricky and I haven't been able to do it yet (I assume the difficulty I'm having is with the fact that gmail uses SSL and I'm not sure how to implement this).  Can anyone provide some insight on how this is done?