reading old, saved thunderbird mail

[Matt Morgan]

My server crashed recently. I've restored the files but not the server.

I had an IMAP server on this machine, and I connected it to it from a
few different computers, always with Thunderbird. After the server
crashed, I moved to a mail host instead of running it myself. I can
connect to that host fine, but on this desktop (FC5 and Thunderbird
via yum, i.e., 1.5.0.9), when I changed my account settings to point
it to the new host, I lost all my existing mail in Thunderbird.

I had backed up before hand, and I have a couple other computers with
Thunderbird that still have all the local files representing the local
copies of the IMAP inbox & other folders.

There has to be a way to tell Thunderbird just to read the local
files, from the backup copy, or otherwise read my saved mail from
those saved copies, right? I can't figure it out.

Thanks,
Matt