OS X V10.6 Snow Leopard :: Mail Lost Links To Its Mailboxes

Mail has been working well for a year on a mac air. mail had been running on my computer yesterday and, I assume it crashed, because when i got home and opened the computer mail was no longer open. and when I opened it it started running me through setup as if i had never used the program.there was no way to open mail without going through the setup -- that seems to be a problem to me right there.I kept canceling the setup but then it wouldn't launch mail. so finally i went through setup and resetup one of my email accounts. the name of the inbox is slightly different althought , as it turned out, the name of the outbox is identical.

the program recognized that there was already any outbox with this name but instead of linking with that in some way it instead named the new outbox "delivered" that's cool to avoid a conflict but there doesn't appear to be any way to tell the program just to reconnect with the previous boxes. I can import them but then then they come  in an import folder. I'd like to get all my mail for a certain account into the same folder, not have what is essentially an archive folder for each account and an active one.

how to reconnect to these old mailboxes as active accounts, or how when importing to merge the appropriate mailbox with the appropriate account.or to restore mailbox settings/preferences or users or whatever was lost. I do have a backup that includes my library files to sugarsync if there is some kind of restore I could try.

Mac OS 10.6.8