[mattyd]

everything was going along smoothly for me until i tried sending an innocent email message using mail.app. i typed a person's name into the to: field, but it didn't find anyone in my address book. i opened my address book, but it was empty! i tried quitting mail, but it wouldn't quit so i force quit. when i relaunched mail, firt it told me that my keychain could not be found and did i want to locate it. sure, i tried but it was gone. when mail did start, it was if it had never run before, asked me if i wanted to see new features, etc. uh-oh, i thought, this is bad.

i restarted my computer and almost the entire system had lost all preferences... my desktop was gone, all icons and the dock were back to default size, but the apps and folders i put in it were still there, custom toolbars were back to default, clock, menu bar, login items, mouse, etc. all hosed. address book empty, ical calendars gone, safari prefs and bookmarks gone too. itunes still had my playlists though.

basically, thanks to backup and a little patience, i was able to get all my system and app prefs back. BUT all my saved mail is missing. any mail that was on an IMAP server (basically a few weeks of mac.com inbox messages) came back. but i had LOTS of sent, and saved messages plus and entire POP account that were stored locally that have disappeared. i tried rebuilding mailboxes and importing old mailboxes, but nothing worked.

does anyone know what i might have done to cause this? or better yet, how i might get my mail back? i no, i haven't backed up my mail in a few months and yes, i know how important that is, so please spare me.

[OpenStep]

how much disk space do you have available?

[mattyd]

4.5 gigs. which worries me a little, because before all this i had 4.1 gigs.

[m4rtin]

This sounds like the symptoms for having no disk space (as questioned above). It happened to me twice but fortunately I recovered the Mail from a backup. The important thing in order to recover it seemed to be not to try and reconfigure it again but to copy the files into relevant places from the backup.
Sorry if this isn't too helpful but a search on here should find the post that helped me.

[mattyd]

OK OK OK !!!!!!! i think i figured out what happened... i think that somehow my entire ~/Library folder got moved into my ~/Documents folder resulting in a new, fresh ~/ Library folder to be created. (shouldn't some permissions thing make this impossible?) anyway it's in there now.

what's the best way to get all my old stuff back? should i copy over the whole ~/Library folder, or should i copy over the contents of it as needed?

first thing i'm gonna do though is burn the whole thing to a cd.