How do I setup email on FreeBSD?

I am new to handling things in a low level fashion and I am horrified at the lack of documentation for newbies who have had zero experience setting up MTAs, MDAs, etc. I simply need to connect to my Gmail account using SMTP and IMAP to send and receive email. I tried reading about sendmail, fetchmail, etc, but I still on level zero of setting up a usable system. How do I achieve this? I don't want my to setup GUI based applications like Thunderbird.