Loosing all mail acounts every time I launch Mail

Question

Ever since the first of the year (01/01/2007), Mail has been problematic. It began with losing all my pop account information. I re-entered all the pop settings and all seemed to be back to somewhat normal (albeit I lost all my previously sent mail). All seemed to be working fine until I quit Mail. I was right back to where I was before, I had to re-enter all the pop settings, and once again I lost all my sent mail. It appears that every time I launch mail it seems it's launching it for the first time. Please help, for email is a huge part of my livelihood and having to go to multiple locations to check mail is killing my productivity.
I have a PB G4 running OS10.2.8 with Mail 1.2.5 (v553)
I am also experiencing similar problems when launching Safari 1.0.3 (v85.8.1) and IE Explorer 5.2.2 (5010.1) -- my computer seems to re-set my preferences back to the factory pre-sets every time I launch these applications.

Answer 1

Your problems are not date related or related to anything else than not having adequate free hard drive space.
RAM is important but a lack of adequate free hard drive space is the key here and you have so little free hard drive space available, there is a good chance data will be lost (more than just application preference file loss) unless you free up some hard drive space in a hurry.
What is your hard drive capacity?
The link provided recommends having no less than 5 GB of hard drive space free so you have some work to do.
After freeing up some hard drive space, there is a way to recover all messages but some of these messages may have been lost due to having such a small amount of free hard drive space available.