I need to write a server application that fetches mails from different mail servers/mailboxes and then needs to process/analyze these mails. Traditionally, I would do this multi-threaded, launching a thread for fetching mails (or maybe one per mailbox) and then process the mails.

We are moving more and more to servers where we have 8+ cores, so I would like to make use of these cores as much as possible (and not use 1 at 100% and leave the seven others untouched). So conceptually, as an example, it would be nice that I could write the application in such a way that two cores are "continuously" fetching emails and four cores are "continuously" processing/analyzing the emails (since processing and analyzing mails is more CPU intensive than fetching mails).

This seems like a good concept, but after studying some parallel patterns, I'm not really sure how this is best implemented. None of the patterns really fit. I'm working in VS2012, native C++, but I guess from a design point of view this does not really matter and just some pointers on how to organize this would be great!