Mail crashed. Relaunched it and got "Welcome to Mail." How to fix?

[doctormelodious]

I was composing an email reply, and Mail abruptly crashed. I relaunched it and got "Welcome to Mail." Now it thinks I'm using this "new version" of Mail for the first time, and wants to import all my existing mailboxes. There were no issues with Mail prior to this crash. I am running Catalina 10.15.7 and have been for quite some time now.

I've deleted the contents of ~/Library/Mail and copied in the contents of the same folder from a known good backup made earlier the same day. I've done the same with com.apple.mail.plist and com.apple.mail-shared.plist in ~/Library/Preferences. Restarted the Mac and launched Mail. Still getting "Welcome to Mail." BTW, all of my email accounts are still present in the Internet Accounts control panel in System Preferences.

Before I submit to this "import existing mailboxes" process for a massive amount of messages, are there any other files (hidden?) I can trash and replace in order to get back to the functioning Mail app I had before this happened?

Thanks!
DM

 

[doctormelodious]

I was composing an email reply, and Mail abruptly crashed. I relaunched it and got "Welcome to Mail." Now it thinks I'm using this "new version" of Mail for the first time, and wants to import all my existing mailboxes. There were no issues with Mail prior to this crash. I am running Catalina 10.15.7 and have been for quite some time now.

I've deleted the contents of ~/Library/Mail and copied in the contents of the same folder from a known good backup made earlier the same day. I've done the same with com.apple.mail.plist and com.apple.mail-shared.plist in ~/Library/Preferences. Restarted the Mac and launched Mail. Still getting "Welcome to Mail." BTW, all of my email accounts are still present in the Internet Accounts control panel in System Preferences.

Before I submit to this "import existing mailboxes" process for a massive amount of messages, are there any other files (hidden?) I can trash and replace in order to get back to the functioning Mail app I had before this happened?

Thanks!
DM

UPDATE: Well, I held my breath and let Mail reimport all my mailboxes. It took awhile, and there were some long-ago trashed emails that reappeared, but other than that it went smoothly and all seems to be back to normal now.