mbp, battery end, harddrive tanked, rescue data, where's my mail!?!

[chmedly]

I've got a 2006 mbp that had a funky aftermarket battery in it. When the charge ran out the computer quit suddenly; no hibernate etc. When I tried to restart I found the OS was somehow hosed. I tried starting it in target disk to access the files from another mac but that just froze up the other mac. I pulled the hd and put it in a usb enclosure and tried to mount it with a newer mac running mavericks. I ran disk utility and it told me that du couldn't repair the drive. I tried it with an older mbp running Lion and disk utility told me the same thing with one important exception; it told me that it would mount the drive but it would be read only. That's great I think. I clone the drive with chronosync to an image file with the intention of reformatting the drive and cloning it back from the image file. After many many hours I think I have a good image but I decide to make sure my mail is backed up to some other drive as well. (the mail is the real important bit of data I would like to save) But, I can't seem to find it. Now, when I was getting this particular machine set up with Apple Mail I imported old mail from a few places and ended up with some "mail" folders in a few different places on the drive which added to the confusion. So, I do see some mail but none of it is more recent than 2011. There should be mail from a week ago on the machine. I started to just do a basic search for emlx files in the hope of finding files with recent dates. After quite a while I do come across files that look like my recent mail. They have correct looking creation dates. The thing is, finder doesn't tell me the path to these files and when I try to open one of them it tells me that it can't find the original that this alias is pointing to. I'm confused. If these are alias files (which they don't appear to be) then why doesn't finder at least tell me where the alias is located? Likewise, why would Mail store aliases in the first place? Any thoughts?