extracting text from large emails

[Jane Jordan (gmail)]

I receive newspapers each day in my inbox as text within the email.   
Every time I try to open one now, Mail seems to, if not lock up,  
freeze at least until I do a force-quit and restart it.  I just want  
to take the text from the email and convert it to MP3, or at least  
listento it in TextEdit.  Is this possible, and ifso, how?

Also how do I turn off cursor tracking so I can click on the splitters  
to make them go away?

Jane