any other ways to do it rather than the plugin and freemacpops?
cheers
No. Webmail accounts are funded by advertising. They want you to visit the site so that they can show traffic stats to current and potential advertisers.
The plug-ins and programs like MacFreePOPs "screen scrape", that is, they literally go out to the webpage behind the scenes and record the content of your email and deliver to your POP-based mailbox.
MacFreePOPs is not plug and play. Once it's running, you'll need to set up accounts in your Mail program for each of the Webmail accounts you wish to check. Then, you need to specify specific parameters to make you mail client talk to FreePOPs.
This tutorial explains how to do it. Although it is geared toward mail applications other than Mail.app, you should be able to take the lessons learned and translate them into Mail.app.
Aside from MacFreePOPs, the only other application I can think of that does something similar would be
Mail Forward, although I have no experience with it.