Lost Email Messages in Inbox

Question

I've recently purchased a new PowerBook to replace my older Powerbook, and recently used the Migration tool to move all my files, settings, applications etc across to the new machine.
Mail 2, upon starting for the first time does it usual conversion of stuff and correctly notes the 28174 messages. However when it say you can start using Mail, it only displays the most recent mail messages for the last seven days (273 messages). Which is not the 10198 messages I have on my old Powerbook in my Inbox (this about the last six years of mail). And I do archive mail regularly into other folders.
I've tried rebuilding the mailbox, checking permssions - the mbox file size it identical to my old machine (518Mb). I've subsequently quit Mail, removed all the folders under ~/Library/Mail, restarted my old Powerbook in firewire mode and tied doing an import through Mail 2 with exactly the same result.
I note a few other people have posted similar experiences with Mail 2. Given this is my first experience with Tiger (10.4.5), until I see this being resolved
I'll use my old Powerbook (10.3.9). Thus far not impressed at all.
PowerBook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.5)  
PowerBook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.5)  

Answer 1

I ended up going back and completely reinstalling the new PowerBook from scratch in case something was up and tried migrating again - same situation.
Next I removed all the files/folders under the /Users/~/Library/Mail directory (ie blank slate)
Having read similar posting from people, I then broke up my Inbox into folders by year received on the old Powerbook and then rebuild each of the mail folders. This had the Inbox down to 701 messages, with each of the folders holding between 396 to 1783 messages each. Restarted my old Powerbook
in firewire mode and then performed a Import Mailboxes. Once the import was
done, the old messages broken into various folders looked ok (ie number of messages matched), however the Inbox showed only 243 messages not the 701 messages originally there. In fact it appeared that only messages received in March were displayed and nothing else. I tried performing a Rebuild of the mailbox and all the messages (all 243) disappered. Searching
failed, as did any further Rebuilds.
So again I cleaned out the Mail directory on the new Powerbook, ejected firewire Powerbook drive and restarted the old Powerbook as normal. On
the old Powerbook, I then created another folder and moved all 701 messages in the Inbox to the newly created folder, thus the Inbox was empty. Restarted the old Powerbook in firewire mode and repeated the Import Mailbox process.
The seemed to go ok, all the messages were there, however I could not move the messages back to the Inbox from the folder. Given the previous experience with rebuilding a mailbox, I tried Rebuilding any of the folders partly to see if the same thing would re-occur - which it did, any mailbox selected and then a Rebuild performed would appear to delete all messages within the folder.
If I look at any of the folders directory using Terminal, I see the following:
-rw------- 1 evans evans 136022756 Apr 1 16:10 Incoming_Mail
-rw-r--r-- 1 evans evans 541600 Apr 1 16:10 IncomingTable_ofContents
-rw-r--r-- 1 evans evans 356 Apr 1 22:30 Info.plist
drwx------ 1784 evans evans 60656 Apr 1 23:00 Messages
The Incoming_Mail file is basically a mbox file (comparing it to 10.3's Mail),
IncomingTable_ofContents, is a concatenation of Subject (with additional formatting). Info.plist is a file containing display information for the folder itself and finally Messages is a folder containing the Mail 2 of the individual messages.
Out of curiosity I wondered if the TableofContents file was somehow being corrupted, so I removed the file and then went to look at the folder - oddly enough I could now view all the messages, whereas before after doing a Rebuild they completely vanished.
In other folders I found the Messages folder has a name of Messages-T0x4c5c70-fTrRll, removing IncomingTable_ofContents in this instance made no difference, nor did removing the Messages-T0.. folder and renaming the Incoming_Messages to mbox and trying a Rebuild again.
I've subsequently cleaned out the Mail folder on the new Powerbook and again perfomed a Import Mailboxes.
From observations there appears to definitely be a problem when importing mail from 10.3.x as well as performing a mailbox rebuild, though I've yet to
determine the cause of the failures.
So looks like its back to the old Powerbook and reliable 10.3.9.