Starting Lion Mail without importing old mails?

with the upgrade to Lion OSX, I lost access to my mails!
Starting Lion Mail it asks to import old mails. Only other choice is cancelling the process.
It then spends around 1hour loading (invisibly) old mails into new Lion mail (ca. 260,000 mails.)
Right before the end of the importing process, it breaks up and send error message that some index has been distroyed.... should restart mail... and it would then repair the index... THIS IS NOT THE CASE.
I am stuck.
Can anyone please tell me, if it is possible to start Lion Mail from scratch preventing it from importing old mails automatically?
I have erased com.mail.plist as well as all folders related to my old emails, but it manages to find the old mails somewhere in the invisible parts of the computer (MacBook Pro).
Thanks for helping out

Those Mail messages are in the Mail folder of your user's Library folder.  With Mail not running, in the Finder hold down an "option" key while you pull down the "Go" menu.  Select Library from the menu list.  In the resulting Finder window move the folder Mail to the Desktop.  You should now be able to launch Mail without that import problem.  This is a guess, but you may be able to import the contents of specific mailboxes from the saved Mail folder.

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