Sent messages disappeared when I rebuild mailbox

Question

15 minutes ago, my SENT email box in MAIL contained sent messages from May 11, 2011 to date, but searches run on that box only would pull up emails from early December.
I rebuilt the mailbox and now only sent emails from early December to-date appear.  Where did the other ones go?  How can I recover them?
Thanks

Answer 1

This has been covered before, but I can't find a post with the solution.
Your Mail is stored in a folder called "Mail" inside your username/Library/ folder.
First, make a copy of your username/Library/Preferences/com.apple.mail.plist and your usernam/Library/Mail folder. You can just put them on the desktop for now.
Here is one option that is different than what I remember, but may do the same thing easier: http://www.geekculture.com/mt2/archives/2009/01/tigermail_tol.html
There's also this: http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=97495
If you delete your com.apple.mail.plist file, you will have to set up all of your accounts from scratch. Once that is done, it should see the folders inside of Mail.
If that doesn't work,
Go to your user/Library/ folder and drag the Mail folder out of that location to somewhere else.
Start Mail and quit. It will create a new Mail folder. Copy the contents of your old mail folder into the new Mail folder.
If all is fixed, you can delete the backup copies you made.