Time Machine & Mail - mail missing; invalid snapshot

Question

To cut a long story short, I did a clean install of 10.6 and lost approximately 2 months of email messages. Good news -- I have Time Machine backups? Not so fast....
I cannot find .emlx files for those messages in the sparsebundle. (Can't seem to do a full search, but I am checking the usual places.)
If I launch Mail then start Time Machine, the Mail pane w/in Time Machine says "Invalid Snapshot". I assume this is due to the backups of messages from an older version of Mail.
Any ideas of what I can try, short of a full restore (which I think would take a long time and would be unlikely to work if I cannot find the emails in the sparsebundle)? Do I just give up (Apple said the messages are gone, though they cannot figure out why I could see them just prior to upgrade to 10.6, then couldn't see them immediately after upgrade + import)?
Could they be cached anywhere?
Thank you so much. I'm desperate here.
More detail is available in this thread: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2143100&tstart=0

Answer 1

hi--
you weren't flippant at all. i appreciated your replies.
when i reviewed hidden files, i could see TM logs on the backed up volumes.
to be clear: in mid-august, i got a new time capsule, so it contains ALL backups ever done on that machine. data should not have rolled off.
i suspect the data is gone. i'm really pretty upset by this -- just disappointed. i have a great deal of apple hardware, apple operating systems, and an apple backup solution, so there's no other vendor involved.
i now realize i could have taken one additional step (archive mailbox?) that might have prevented this from happening, but nowhere in the apple support documents did i see that this was necessary (copying home/Library/Mail & prefs was listed as enough), and i didn't think i'd need a 3rd option (in additon to the copy + my TM backups).
ugh.
it's truly puzzling as o where these could have gone. i'm unsure as to whether to trust it in the future.
do you think there is any issue with possibly having restored to a different (physical) drive? i know TM keeps that thumbprint of each drive, and since i restored to a USB boot drive (and restored my data to another RAID set), could that be preventing me from doing a proper restore? i wouldn't think so.
*here's the main issue at the moment:* this is my primary machine, and it's now been down for 4 days. it will be another 3-5 days before i get an answer from engineering (my bet? "we don't know."). i'm hesitant to do any real work on the machine, as that will involve data being overwritten...just in the longshot case that they will have some idea about it. however, it seems really unlikely that any data will be recovered. do i just give up and go on? if i set up the system to use time machine again, i'm worried (as i've seen before) that it will overwrite the prior backups and render them inaccessible. if i use the system without a backup plan, then i'm exposed to more trouble.
the good news? i had sent in full system logs from mid-august (when mail was working) in response to another issue. (engineering's solution: reinstall the OS.) they just had me send in new logs today. i doubt they'll make any difference.
hope you enjoy your new toy! be extra careful with that restore!
i sincerely thank you with your efforts to help. i'm just frustrated as all of this is from one vendor and when OS's and software is designed to run on only one set of systems, there should be fewer opportunities for error. this is a pretty big deal, IMO.