[goodnightgracie]

I stepped away from my laptop last night and the battery ran out. When I restarted, Mail said something about restarting to fix an error. When it restarted, I got the "Welcome to Mail" screen to set up my mail accounts.

Mail has been acting funny for a bit since I've upgraded to Leopard: junk mail in my mailboxes when it should go straight to trash, incorrect unread mail count next to the folders, having problems handling attachments, etc.

I repaired permissions on the disk to no avail. Trashed the preference file too, as others have suggested, but no dice.
I have found my Mail data in user/Library/Mail and copied it to my desktop. Any ideas how to fix it? I'm terrified of not being able to access about 7 years of email.

Many thanks!

[TETENAL]

If you have a Time Machine backup, restore the old preference file from yesterday. If you don't start using it. And reenter your accounts info manually.

[goodnightgracie]

I am on the road and I don't have a TimeMachine backup. Should I reenter the accounts info manually, then move the mailbox info somewhere so that it restores? It looks like all the data is still there, just the front end isn't pointing to it, so is asking for me to set it up as if new.

[TETENAL]

If I remember correctly (and this is years ago that the same things happened to me, so it might have changed) simply recreating the same accounts gave me all my mailboxes and their contents back. I left everything in place inside ~/Librar/Mail/ of course. Since you made a backup copy of this folder on your desktop now, I think there is little risk in giving this a try.