Rebuild Mailbox Lost Emails HELP

I inadvertently clicked Rebuild Mailbox for the main INBOX of one of my POP accounts, and have lost over 8,000 important emails. I saw a few posts by others who had experienced this, but no answers that were helpful. Three attempts to restore this from Time Machine have failed, though restoration of the OTHER main POP Account's lost mail seems to have succeeded.
Really? A simple command in a menu with no explanation or warning dialogue that you are going to lose major files?
I have gone into the hidden user Library and find an entry for that Inbox, but nothing within the folder makes any sense to me at all. A complicated string of characters as a folder-name (and, no, there are no .noindex extensions anywhere) with subfolders just consisting of many folders designated by single integers.
Please help.

Hi
I'll try and explain what I did more clearly. Following advice elsewhere I created a duplicate account of one which already existed and which I had been using. I named the account differently but it was a second account of an email account I was already using. The reason I did this was to try to set it up so that I could request a read receipt on an email to one person and I read on another site that this was how to do it. Upon finding that this made no difference and without having written, send or received any emails using the new duplicate account I decided to delete it.
Once I had deleted it I went to my email to find that the emails I had previously sent and received using the original account with the same email address had all disappeared.
I checked using finder for them and I can't see them.
I am new to using a mac so bare with me.
Thanks in advance for any help or advice. I really need to try to get these emails back.

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