Can I Get Some Assistance From The Forum Genius Bar?

Question

Hi everyone,
I don't usually post here unless I am at the point of being beyond frustration when it comes to solving my issues, because when they occur -- they are always the ones that don't have a simple fix it seems.
The issue: I only use Mail to access the numerous (and I mean many Gmail accounts I have).  Last night it stopped working, as in Connection Doctor I kept seeing smtp red errors and no matter what I did to adjust the settings, I could not get any accounts to go online.  After messing around for awhile, I got the bright idea to delete all accounts in Mail/Preferences thinking that somehow I could just restore all the settings from a Time Machine backup right before the problems started. It would go through the process but when I started to see that it was copying things where they thought they should go, I'd get permission errors.  Today it hit me that this is probably because I used to have a 15" MBP that I used Migration Assistant to transfer setting over to the MBP I currently use and there is something causing confusion. If I recall it was a Lion to Lion migration and then I installed Mountain Lion when it came out.
So today I got the bright idea to restore each mailbox individually.  It appeared to be successful, but I got tired of it when I had gotten down to the last few accounts to restore the Inbox in because I also had a lot of folders with messages "On My Mac" -- and the way I had Gmail configured, each account had their own "sent" outbox/things were mapped to Trash/Junk/Drafts -- and it was a little too ambitious for what I wanted to do.  That's the main reason I thought somehow I could just go back in time and restore everything to the way it was.  Then I saw some things online about Time Machine fiddling around with permissions and doing unusual things.  I did notice whenever I looked at the Mail folder in Time Machine, that I couldn't change the admin permission -- even though I'm the only one who uses my computer and my username had both read/write permissions as it is an admin, but the "admin" on the list under my username couldn't write and I couldn't change it.
I googled around and saw some people saying that they had success of using "cp - R" and all sorts of other things where you could go into Terminal to strip the Time Machine permissions so that they have no ownership in order to be able to prevent permission "errors" in restoration attempts.
I am not afraid to use Terminal, but I am not a genius when it comes to knowing all of its intricacies, but I can follow directions well. I'm guessing I will have to log in as the root user and do some nifty things?
So, can someone here walk me through using cp - R or any other successful method even if that means using a combination of Time Machine, Terminal, and casting spells so that I can restore Mail back to the way it was last night before it went kaput?  I despise logging into Gmail online, and really don't want to add all of my individual Gmail accounts on both the iPhone and iPad which both connect to Gmail without a hitch (currently).
Before my eyes started to cross from my online research, I saw that lots of people have problems with Mail in Mountain Lion (among other things).  I'm running 10.8.2 and everything is updated.  My first priority is to get all of the messages back in Mail -- in each mailbox, and all the ones I had stored on my mac.  If I can get gmail cooperative again where it will send/receive without a hitch is the next thing I'd like to do.
I did noticed that sometimes it looked like Mail did go to sleep from time to time, but it would always seem to wake up and check for new mail. And on the rare occasions where some of the accounts took themselves offline, I could bring them back on with no problem.  Last night everything just blew up.
I know it's fully my fault as I should have never deleted anything in Preferences but at that point, I was just so frustrated and grasping at straws to make things work again.
I know the answer is probably not as bad as I imagine, so I will be forever grateful if someone here can help.  Kappy or Linc
Oh sorry, all the Gmail accounts were set up for IMAP.

Answer 1

I currently am using Postbox during the trial period because the frustration of trying to solve this ridiculous problem I posted about above was too much.  Unlike most people, I won't rant and rave about OS X's decline after Lion and Mountain Lion as I never had major issues after upgrading to either of them.  It's just beyond belief that the magnitude of this last problem being able to break an app within something that is just supposed to "work" that is beyond me.
Anyway, I was wondering if anyone who uses Postbox might be able to offer a suggestion or two about how to import mailboxes from a Time Machine backup as I would still like to have access to those folders which were "On My Mac" with all of the archived messages which were contained within each of them?  I know that you can import from Apple Mail, but that's only if it is currently set up they way you want it to be.  And as I no longer have those settings because I can't restore to the point before I deleted all the accounts, etc. from Mail in my frustration -- I'm sure I can't just point Postbox to some plist file to have it mimic my old Mail setup.
Anyone?