Help restoring email?

I have my email set up through my iMac via Imap, and tried to set it up on my macbook yesterday. I did something wrong, so in a stupid move, I deleted the inbox on my macbook.

Thus, I was only able to recover the last week of previous messages, because the default setting of "Delete messages after they are a week old and in trash" was selected.

I have my imac backed up with time machine. But with Imap I know the messages stay on the server. So is there any way for me to restore these messages? Thanks.

 

I was able to restore all these messages with time machine. Awesome.

However, it's strange, when i go into time machine (with inbox open on desktop) it shows my inbox as it SHOULD be...messages sorted through as they were before the delete..with TODAY'S date!

If i go back to a week before (where i had to restore to) I'm back to a messy 120 message inbox..instead of the 50 or so that i should have.

So to clarify

last tuesday, i had 120 messages (last time i backed up time machine)

i cleaned out my inbox to 50 messages by friday.

saturday, messed up and everything was deleted that was over a week old.

so i am down to 30 messages today

today, i go into time machine, it starts w/today, and shows my inbox having the correct 50 emails (the 50 i sorted out)

so it's showing me the way my inbox should be in time machine...but in reality the messages aren't there? whattt?