Mail help - Out timestamp issues

[Gretchen Hayman]

Hi all,

I've been using Mail since it was released and have had a fairly good 
experience with it.  Until today.  Today, as I was attempting to find 
an e-mail I sent on a specific date, the timestamp on ALL of the 
messages in my Out box changed to today's date and time.  I had clicked 
on the little "sort by date" triangle (it always seems to want to put 
the most recent at the top and I want them at the bottom) and *poof* 
3007 messages suddenly had the wrong timestamp!  They also all show as 
unread.  I rebuilt the mailbox, but it's still screwed up.  I quit & 
relaunched Mail, then rebuilt the mailbox.  Still no joy.  I marked 
them all as read, then again rebuilt the Mailbox.  Now they all show up 
again as unread.

I use IMAP, but only my In box resides on the server, all other 
mailboxes (including my Out) sit "On My Mac".  We do daily backups; my 
last one was last night, so restoring from that is possible if I need 
to.  I'm probably going to poke around and see what I can see, but this 
is extremely annoying.  No relevant messages in Console or system.log.

Have I just found the limit to the number of files in one's Out box 
(3007)??  Any suggestions or advice?  Any CLI magic welcome as well, as 
I spend a good portion of my day in Terminal.

Thanks!

Gretchen