I lost an email with an attachment that I needed. Actually, I didn't lose it -- I deleted it sometime in the months between when I got it and when I needed it. Thankfully, I had saved a backup of my entire home folder on CD.
I found Mail.app's Mail folder in ~/Library/Mail/, and found the appropriate account folder (in this case, the iTools one ... I'm on 10.1.5 and newer systems might have these folders named differently). Regardless, I found the INBOX.imapmbox package inside, and control-clicked on the package to "Show Package Contents." From there, I opened the "CachedMessages" folder and saw a list of numbered files. Assuming that you've set Mail.app to cache your IMAP messaged locally, you could use a text editor or Sherlock or something similar to find the right file.
Since my mail had an attachment, it had three files: 1800.partial, 1800.1, and 1800.2. The first contained most of the message, the second the first MIME section, and the final the last MIME setion.
In order to rescue my attachment, I copied the text from the 1800.2 file and pasted it into the 1800.partial file, replacing the last line, which read:
------_=_NextPart_000_01C30372.A2F18C40--I then was able to open the 1800.partial file with StuffIt Expander, which returned my attachment to me!
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