How to recover from clicking the deadly "Rebuild" in Mail?

There were 8500 emails in the Inbox of the Mail folder I pulled aside.

I have my own domain name and use Bluehost.com as my ISP.

I need all my old Sents. I need everything the way it was before I clicked "Rebuild" (better name "Destroy").

I'd be happy to do anything manually that might help, like putting emails back into folders. But it seems that Mail doesn't recognize such actions. It needs to reindex. Oh, I know -- I just recalled a step that I didn't do in this last refresh: I did a Safe Boot earlier, then I think I removed the mail.plist, etc. Oh well! I'm very confused.

I wish I could get a grasp of how Mail worked then I could use it and understand it and not be confused. But any program that ruins itself when "Rebuild" is clicked is scary, to me.

The numbering and tracking and indexing of the mail files just seems weird.

Who knows, maybe I was getting corruption anyway. I had changed the name of a mailbox and the mailbox wasn't changing its position alphabetically into the new correct order -- all my other mailboxes and new boxes go into alpha ordering -- so I was frustrated -- and then I clicked Rebuild.

It's amazing how disrupting it is to have this occur. And, clearly, I'm not making much progress. All steps forward have been coming about a half-day apart and so I lose the thread of what I've done before (since I'm having to do other work in the meantime, etc.). And since my last step forward was actually a big step backward, I'm going to try to push forward again with this now, in the dark... I'll try a manual replacement. I might have to tolerate losing those 103 emails with the duplicate numberings. Anyone know how to re-import duplicate Inbox emails so that they get fresh new numbering properly indexed, etc.?

PS: OK, it's been another most of a day gone by. Whew, 3 work days lost so far. I've been floundering in the dark. Anyway, today I thought I could ID the POP folder in my Lib/Mail folder that was "live." I *thought* that I tested dragging an email to one of its Inbox, Sent, Drafts and that this worked. Recall that I had two POP folders for some reason. Mail generated the second one at some point. There was overlap in the numbering, of 103 emails. I decided to back those up then just overwrite them. So I thought I put all emails into the "active" POP folders then I dragged out the Prefs file and restarted. That started reloading 3000 or so emails from the server, I suppose. I saw there was no Drafts folder. So I canceled that. I copied a previous "good" Prefs file back into the Prefs folder over top of the just-generated one then restarted. At some point I got Mail to display a limited Inbox again and a Drafts box with 1 draft. My desired Drafts box in the Mail folder has 100+ drafts in it, so Mail clearly was NOT looking at the POP folder in the Lib/Mail folder but was still somehow "attached" to a POP folder that I had dragged into the Trash.

ARGH!

I'm JUST trying to get all my emails into POP folders so that they will appear in Mail when I start it.

I'm having NO LUCK trying to chase down a Prefs file that is working with the right POP folders. I have a bunch of these now on my desktop, in backup folders and in the trash. It looks like Mail has been RENAMING Pop folders that are in the trash! I see they have numbers attached to them now. ("13-27-23" is appended after the folder name of one.)

It would be the most marvelous thing if someone who understood Mail would reply and then wait for me to do what they say then reply again. I can't keep losing entire days nor can I keep struggling in the dark on this.

Thanks so much to anyone!

BDAqua -- any chance you're there or know how to help??? THANKS!!!! I know it's a lot to ask.