Orphaned mail messages following upgrade - how to reclaim them?

I've recently upgraded my G5 iMac to 10.5 from 10.4. The upgrade did not go smoothly. I made a bootable clone of my disk to an external HD, but this would not boot correctly (it started up but I could not log in), and so I ended up doing an erase and install, and then migrating everything from my laptop rather than from the external HD. I'm now moving across what I need piece by piece from the external HD.
With Mail I have a ~/Library/Mail folder on my upgraded iMac which works fine, but I also have an "orphaned" ~/Library/Mail folder on my external HD, with lots of useful email messages in it.
Question: How can I move all the old mail messages from the orphaned folder into the live folder, so that Mail.app recognises them and I can work with them?
This must have happened to others. Any input most welcome.
Regards
Graham

Have a look at this article* I wrote:
http://www.macmaps.com/diskfull.html
Hope you are able to find your lost space.
- * Links to my pages may give me compensation.

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