I'd go for ettercap since it can do much more than cain can. Cain is good for sniffing voip stuff.
You can write custom ettercap filters that fetch the email for you.
Ettercap can be fully extended with plugins as well, it requires some scripting from your part, but the tradeoff is that you can completely customise which data to capture and how to process it.
You can use ettercap in combination with ethereal if you want, or any other sniffer. You can use ettercap for arp poisening, and ethereal for filtering data without having to go through any script writing in ettercap.
Here is a screenshot with ethereal and an email filter applied. (I only added the pop protocol, you could make it capture both pop and smtp if you want)
Using ettercap's ARP Poisoning features you can capture all data on the network (so not just data from / to your machine)
By default, ethereal captures silently (to avoid overflowing the buffer when allot of data gets sent really fast and there are no filters set.) but you can enable live data monitoring.
(the screenshot is taken on linux but it also runs on windows.)
http://www.ethereal.com/http://ettercap.sourceforge.net/