Missing mail messages-can anyone help?

Question

Short story: I upgraded a Mac from 10.3.9 to 10.4.3 and now none of my old received mail messages are in my inbox.
Long story: Installed Tiger using "Archive and install". Repaired permissions. Installed the combo updater to 10.4.3 using software update. Repaired permissions again. After the system was upgraded to 10.4.3 I opened mail. It said it was importing messages. However, when it was done, there were only 6 messages from the last few days. The other 400 or so messages that had been in mail (in the inbox) in the previous version were not in the mailbox. I tried rebuilding the mailbox. This resulted in losing all of these 6 messages. I tried importing from the old account mailbox and mail re-created the mailbox structure, again with only 6 messages in the inbox.
I have tried re-importing my inbox which is listed as 18.2 mb in size but I get a dialog box that says there are no valid mail messages to be imported. I have tried importing messages from my backup disk, a backup created before the 10.4.3 upgrade but it gives me the same “no valid messages to be imported.” I have tried rebooting but there are still only 6 messages in the inbox to be seen.
Of note, the sent mail box is full of messages and appears to have been upgraded appropriately.
The application mail and all associated mailboxes etc are in their default locations. I have not moved or modified any of the locations of files.
Any ideas on what happened and more importantly how to restore or otherwise make visible all of my mail messages?
Thanks,
Pete

Answer 1

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy,
The same here -- Mail.app 2.0.5 eating messages.
Here I go: have just finalized my update from 10.3.9 to 10.4.3 after using 10.4.3 as a secondary system but keeping email and addresses and stuff on 'prime time' 10.3.9 system up until today.
After some trying (and always starting over from clean files again), this is the way I have migrated my email:
In 10.3.9:
1) Clean up the old mail boxes and move all messages from "Sent" and "Inbox" to real mail folders "Old Sent" and "Old Inbox".
In 10.4.3:
2) Take the Mail preferences from the old system to the new one (to have all the accounts)
3) Take the Address Book preferences and application support files from old to new.
This all worked well.
4) Start Mail.app. This builds an empty mail box hierarchy.
5) Use the "File/Import" command to import all my old mailboxes.
First it seemed OK. My "Old Inbox" folder was there with about 120 messages (that was yesterday). Today I fire up Mail.app and find 5 messages left in "Old Inbox". I check a few other mail boxes.
Conclusion:
The new Mail.app just drops email messages. No error. No warning. Nothing. How can I rely on this software? I can't!
I have big mail folders and small ones. Mail.app seems to randomly decide to discard messages. One mail folder which Mail.app 1.3.11 happily handles (~1800 messages, ~43MB) has shrunk to 400 messages. I spied into the Mail.app 2.0.5 mail database (the file/folder structure it uses to store things) and I can see the missing messages are not just hidden -- they are truly gone from the database. Above mentioned folder gets exactly one message every day. So I can see if there are messages missing. It has kept the messages of the last 400 days. In the "Old Inbox" folder mentioned earlier I can see no pattern of which messages are gone
Thank god I still have 10.3.9 on a (now) external disk.
Are some of the controllers of Mail.app quality reading this? Aye? Please do something. How can it be that a comparatively simple function (storing email messages) is breaking down so badly in a piece of software that is a few years old?
If I could at least run Mail.app 1.3.11 on my 10.4.3 system then I could wait for Mail.app 2.0.6 and keep hoping. But the old Mail.app will not start up on 10.4.3.
Or someone please tell me what I've done wrong.
Cheers,
Jörg
  Mac OS X (10.4.3)