Mail.app ate my POP box. Help.

[Weston C]

It looks as if I've just lost mail dating back to August of last year.
I had a message which was peculiarly placed at the bottom of my inbox
-- even though it was #404 and I was sorting by # descending (so the
sequence was 404, 1, 2, 3 , 4, ... 402, 403). After changing the sort
order a few times to make sure this wasn't a fluke, I decided it must
be time to rebuild the mailbox.

Big mistake.

When it was done (startlingly quickly) the only thing that was left
was the odd message (and 12 pieces of spam I'd just deleted).

I went into ~/Library/Mail/POP:myac...@sun.he.net/INBOX.mbox and
threw mbox open in vi to see if somehow this was just indexing gone
wrong, but it doesn't look good. The contents of mbox seem pretty
consistent with what Mail.app is telling me.

If anyone has any other ideas of where 400 mail messages disappeared
to, please let me know.

Also, needless to say, I am pretty pissed off. Foremost at myself for
actually letting down my guard enough to trust software to actually
just work and not to do something like this. I should have been using
IMAP. I should have been making monthly backups.

But this is a pretty horrible gotcha, don't you think?