Lost mails while moving mail folders

I was reorganising my mails into mail folders and suddenly I lost all mails (many folders are empty).
In the specific I created a new folder called "projects new" in which I tried to put in all the folders and subfolders contained in an old "projects" folder. Something went worng as the programme was not able to copy the mails and their folders and subfolders. The result is that all folders I tried to move into the new folders are still there but empty.
Any advice?
Thansk luciano

First duplicate the entire Mail folder for backup purposes (~/Library/Mail)
Now choose each mailbox one by one and do a Rebuild from the Mailbox menu

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All of my custom email folders have disappeared. This is tragic, as my last backup was several months ago (yes yes... I know this is my own fault). After reading around online here, I see that the Preferences file can get corrupted if hard drive space is low. I am guessing that this is my problem, since I had Photoshop running at the same time, and only 6gig free on my 80gig drive, and remember a pop-up window appearing in Photoshop saying that my hard drive space was low.
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Hi all. I sure appreciate everybody's suggestions and feedback. Even though ultimately things have not worked out for me, I have a renewed faith in the Apple community as a whole -- which counts for something.
I'll try to sum up what happened for me. First, my mail folders/mbox files were nowhere to be found on my computer (either by looking in that specific heirarchy or by doing a Find for their names). Also, I did not delete any accounts at the time of the problem. I DID delete a folder from within Mail that showed up at the top of my Mail list, named "/" and which contained a single folder named "library" (I think?) which contained a single folder named "mail" or something to that effect. Basically, several folders nested within each other, with the bottom folder being caled "INBOX" (written like that) and containing mail that I had not seen before. I selected all, dragged it to my real InBox, and then deleted the top-level folder from Mail's list (named "/"). It was shortly thereafter that I lost all of my mail folders. I've never seen a mailbox folder just add itself to the list like that -- has anybody else? And then combine that with the fact that I was running a huge Photoshop file and had maxed out my hard drive's empty space as PS used it up for memory... So basically it evidently all set up a situation that caused corruption on a huge level, and caused me to lose every custom mailbox that I had defined, but not my InBox, Drafts, Sent Mail or Junk. (Luckily my Junk mail was saved, eh? How lucky for me. ha ha)
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Nobody ever seemed to think I would have much luck, but I had to give it a shot, since losing all of that mail was going to be hard for me.
And so this afternoon, I have come to the conclusion that my situation is hopeless, and I need to get back the use of my Powerbook (I have huge deadlines that I'm really behind on now, because of all of this down-time having software check my drive).
The lesson here, boys and girls, is to not take lightly the significance of hard drive space -- and to not only backup your most important files (like I did)... but to also back up your mail folder regularly... as well as any other quirky little things that might not seem obvious, but which if were eliminated from your life, would make you sad.
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Lost mails while moving mail folders

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