How to locate all emails?

[zaqq]

Title: How to locate all emails?

In an attempt to fix some bad juju GUI sluggishness, and for lack of skill, I did the idiot's version of backup, and simply copied my Identity folder, burned it onto a CD, and then slashed and burned through most of my Sent and Delete folders. This looked like it removed about 5,000 emails. However, when restarted my computer, and did an Advance Rebuild of the database, it showed that it was rebuilding 20,000 emails. Yet I only had 9,000 to start with before deleting all those 5,000 emails. In other words, it should have shown that it was rebuilding 4,000 emails, not 20,000.

How do I find out where all these emails are? Is there a better way to do this slimming down process?

Scott