lost preferences in mac osx mail on Tiger
after a forced shutdown I lost all my mail and mail preferences - possibly because of filevault not getting time to rewrite files or something?
fortunately I had backed up my home folder to an external drive earlier in the day (a good idea!). After much trial and error I got it working again by deleting the file com.apple.mail.plist in (my home folder)Library/Preferences/ amd deleting the Mail folder in (my home folder)Library/ and replacing with the versions from my backup.