Almost all messages disappeared from Mail's Sent folder

A friend of mine running OSX 10.4.11 with all Apple updates on an Intel iMac about a year and half old, is having problems with Mail. She seems to have lost all her Sent messages from before Jan. 24th. As she put it: "Came in on 1/25, to find only three message left in my sent messages" dating 1/24." She's using an IMAP account, and a broadband Ethernet DSL modem.
Personally I rarely use Mail, preferring Mailsmith/POP, so am not that familiar with the app - or with IMAP. After looking up Mail Help I suggested she first rebuild the Sent folder and instructed her how to do that over the phone. It went through it's paces but didn't improve the situation. Sent mailbox still only contains messages dating from Jan.24th. There should be several years of Sent messages in that box.
Then I had her try the next thing on the Help page, which was reindexing Mail, done by quitting Mail, removing certain files from the ~/Library/Mail folder, launching Mail and waiting for it to retrieve stuff from the server. That didn't solve the problem either. The other mailboxes seem to have all their messages intact, and the Mail app seems to be working normally otherwise. She hasn't done a backup since the problem occurred, but restoring from that would eliminate all the mail she has received since.
I'd greatly appreciate any other suggestions on how to get her missing messages back.
thanks,
ncm

Hopefully someone with more knowledge will pitch in. In my friend's case it isn't a dot mac account.
Could it be related to the allocated space on the server being too full? There are several years of email stored there and it's an office, so I imagine there's a lot of mail. Not being very familiar with IMAP I don't know if the stored mail could get messed up if there isn't much room left on the server.

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