Ok, so now I'm frustrated. Everything was working just fine for the last 2 weeks. I had avoided compacting folders as that seemed to do weird and wonderful things to folders and accounts. But now, for reasons I don't quite understand, I have completely lost over half my mail accounts!
Here's the deal: AT&T finally decided we'd have to change our email addresses, so I was in the process of updating that. I'd added the new accounts (6 altogether), and verified that all was well for sending and receiving all of them. The next step was to delete the old, soon-to-be-obsolete accounts. In the middle of doing that (I was in the "Edit=>Mail & Newsgroups account settings" window), some of the headers for my accounts disappeared, but the sub headers (Server Settings, Copies and Folders and so on) were still visible and readable. I figured it was just a memory problem, so I closed down M&NASettings, shut down Netscape and rebooted. BIG mistake! Everything that had "disappeared" was.. well. gone! Here's the kicker, though: all the folders that are automatically created when you create a new account are still there. So is my NEW (freshly added) default SMTP server. So, what to do? I don't want to recreate all those accounts (groan!) when they're still there. Surely there's a file I can edit, just the same way I discovered the rules (message filters) can be edited by hand in a text editor, yes? Thanks, and forgive my long-windedness. It just seemed so weird I thought it would be best to be as specific as I can. Jaguwar
