Mail Reset After Kernel Panic- Accounts/Rules/preferences missing

Question

My MbP had a kernel panic this evening and after the restart, I opened mail and got the "Welcome to Mail" message.
Tried restarting again, resetting pram (not sure why, but did), deleting preferences, etc. But all my mail preferences and accounts are missing.
They do still exist in the ~/library/Mail folder
But all my rules, smart folders, custom settings, etc are gone.
Any idea why this would happen?

Answer 1

Just wanted to make a quick reply because I had the same problem happen today, my MacBook Pro running 10.6.6, crashed with a kernel panic while using mail, although after checking the logs, it appears coreaudio caused the crash (had iTunes open in the background, perhaps a problem there?), had to do a force shutdown and restart (this is a very rare occurance that my MBP crashes).
When I started up again, mail would not start directly, instead was asking for details to set up a new account with the 'Welcome to Mail' message.
The fix was to move the mail preferences file (~/library/preferences/com.apple.mail.plist) to the desktop (or trash) and recover the most recent preferences file (com.apple.mail.plist) from time machine or other backup to the original location (~/library/preferences/com.apple.mail.plist).
Once I did that, restarted mail and all settings, messages, mailboxes, etc.. were exactly in place with no change (even the message I was typing when it crashed was still in the Drafts folder).
So this fix works as long as you have a back up.
(note I added extra info/explanation into this post for search engine's sake to make it easier to find)