Saving Web Mail to Hard Disk

I use a gmail POP account to get my emails from my ip.
I want to be able to save an email to my local hard drive as txt or htm
When I tell EI 11 to Save as.. .txt, the file is unreadable.
When I save it as an htm and open it I'm sent to the gmail login but
gmail seem to hang for a long time at login. I don't get to the inbox at all and need to close IE.

Any ideas how to save web mail to my hard drive???

James

ThunderBird. How to Access Gmail with Mozilla Thunderbird - About Email

Then you make a local folder and drag your messages from your inbox to it.

I'm getting away from the email clients.
I was hopping to find some way of accomplishing this without it.

How about this: Save a Gmail message to hard disk :: The Brush Blog

I found a decent way.
If I open the email and press ctl-p the print dialog comes up.
I then can select Microsoft XPS Document Writer, Windows saves the mail
as an OXPS to my Documents folder.
This work oks in Internet Explorer in metro.