How can I programmatically access the contents of Dovecot Maildir in CentOS 7?

I just set up postfix and dovecot on a CentOS 7 server using this tutorial. I am able to successfully create a mail record using echo "TEST" | mail -s "testmail" youruser@localhost && tail -f /var/log/maillog. But how can I access and work with the resulting email files?

I need to configure a java program to process incoming email, including decomposing and processing attachment files. This could be done using either mysql or simply raw files. But I need to know where to have the java program look for the mail.

As per the tutorial, I set mail_location = maildir:~/Maildir in /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-mail.conf. But when I type cd /home/youruser/Maildir, the terminal replies with -bash: cd: Maildir: Permission denied. Similarly, sudo cd /home/youruser/Maildir simply results in the terminal ignoring the command and remaining in whatever directory it was previously in.