I finally used Time Machine

The settings on my Comcast mail account magically shifted themeselves inside mail, and I was unable to access my Inbox through Mail. I tried resetting all the passwords, ports, and so forth, as laid out in Comcast's instructions, but to no avail.

When I tried to access my mail through the web, Comcast's website would not recognize my password, which had always worked before.

I thought that perhaps something funky was going on with Mail, so I downloaded Mozilla Thunderbird and tried to set it up. It told me that Comcast was rejecting my password.

I finally reset my website password and accessed my mail through the web interface, but Mail still wouldn't work with either the old or the new password.

I wrote to Comcast Help, and they sent me back a note suggesting that I do what I had already done--which I had explained in the note.

In desperation, I decided to open a gmail account, which Mail accepted just fine. Now I am using gmail for personal mail, client mail, and mailing lists, and leaving commercial messages and other non-urgent stuff on Comcast, which I access on the web once or twice a day.

Well, during this process, Mail lost my Comcast Inbox. It was gone. Vanished. "Restore" did absolutely nothing. It was not in Libraries or anywhere else, and there were some messages I wanted to keep.

Then I remembered Time Machine. I opened it up, found the Comcast Inbox from a couple of days ago, and restored it. It's now a separate folder in Mail, but at least I can find those messages.

YAY!

Time Machine is the greatest thing since sliced bread. Following the food analogy, it has saved my bacon and Sparkly's veggie patties more than once.

We have had the inexplicable e-mail issues with both Comcast (before we quit them) and Verizon Fios. We both have company websites and get our e-mail direct from them as POP-3. If there's ever a problem, there is a live human here in the US who will help us. During business hours, it is the same person every time, as they are assigned to our accounts and are paid to take care of us (and a few hundred others, I'm sure).

You may want to consider a Mobile Me account through Apple. $99.00 a year is fairly reasonable for reliable e-mail that is 1000% compatible with your computer's OS. We use that, too, to host some silly websites we have and it works great.

When I was a pc user, I would sporadically copy stuff I thought might be important to a flash drive, but that's about it.

At least now I have a regular backup program that backs up just about everything.

It's already saved me once.

i was unhappy with snow leopard, and tried to fall back to leopard, via the disc. oooooops.
restoring the last of my stuff right now.

argh. giving me trouble. saying i don't have permission to move my iphoto library. oh, well, i'll keep pounding.

Here's the time line -
Thursday evening - tried to upload videos to our website - disc stalled - MacBook froze. Ejected the disc and restarted - got the dreaded blinking folder with the question mark and a clicking noise from the hard drive. Left the machine alone and tried to start from the system disc. Couldn't find the hard drive. Left it alone again and then gave it a light smack. The machine booted and I furiously copied some files along with doing a Time Machine back up.
Friday morning - Booted again and did another Time Machine backup - headed to Springboard Media here in Philly and left with a rental machine and the knowledge that if we needed a new hard drive Apple Care was going to pay for it.
Saturday - bit nails all day
Sunday - In the Shop Rite and get a call from the service department. "The directory was 30% corrupted, we think we can fix it and save your data. But if we save your data it's going to cost $300. Oh, you've got a Time Machine backup? We'll do an erase and install. You can put your data back." Thirty minutes later - "It's fixed, come pick it up. It's $100 plus the rental."

Thank you Springboard and Time Machine!