telnet - sending telnet commands and saving sessions to a file using C

Is there a way in which i can telnet to a pop3 server sed it USER PASS and STAT messages to get the number of messages and then QUIT? What i want to do is to count the number of messages, and if there are messages in the mail box i want to get the header using TOP and save the header to a file. I will then later decypher the header to figure out who sent the message. Once ive figured out who sent it i can interrigate my program to for sending text messages, and send a message to my phone indicating that i have a new message and who it is from. Is this possible using just C and not making it window-fied. I want the program to be portable-ish and i maily want to run it on my unix machine and interrogate my mail server.

Sorry if thats a bit of babble.

Hope you can help, cheers.