You could download all your emails with pop or imap if you wanted. This has always been supported. It would have been nice to use WordPerfect but as you mention people wanted a conversion that retain the layout of the original .doc

When I can't even get a simple table from Office to WordPerfect to work properly what's the point (nothing fancy), where not talking excel formulas. If the document specs had been made available, you bet WordPerfect would have that implemented in no time. Word did have good support for WordPerfect files thus it was a one way street.