Time Machine restore

hiya,
i am fairly new to OS X and have recently had to do a hard restore using the dvd disks that i got with my macbook. i have an external drive with a full time machine back up on it, but i want to slowly add all my old files etc rather than restore from it completly.
my question, if anyone can help me is this; what folders do i need to restore in order to get my internet settings (bookmarks network settings etc) and 'mail' settings (old emails, folders and inbox etc) back the way they were?
i have had a quick look at the migration tool but it seems i will copy all the user settings by using this programme. i am hoping that it will be a case of finding user/library/mail/.... in the time machine backups and press restore to make those 2 programmes (safari and mail) work like they did before the hard reset.
any help would be great - thanks in advance

Hi, welcome to the forums.

To restore your bookmarks in Safari, you want to fire up TimeMachine and navigate to the /Users/your-username/Library/Safari/ folder.

You will need to restore the Bookmarks.plist file from whatever backup interval you want (probably the latest before the re-install).

For Mail you can do the same thing. Navigate to

/Users/your-username/Library/Mail/

Restore the entire folder and everything you had before the reinstall should reappear the next time you open Mail.

Let us know how it goes.

thanks very much for the welcome and the sound advice. very clear and for safari it worked a treat!
i needed to set up mail again no matter how i restored from TM. after setting up my imap settings etc it took a while but restored all back to normal. - now back to the slow process of updating os x and applications that i managed to restore!
one thing though i cant find my ical and address book files to restore them to the original ones, if there is an easy way then i would appreciate it,
thanks again!