> If it is Exchange you likely can recover their deleted messages.
The mail client being used in the particular case is installed on the local harddisk and is configured to remove the mail from the mailserver.

As for my own personal opinion, I think that it was foolish on the part of the users to rely on storing items in Trash folders (considering the likelyhood that they would get purged under routine maintenance). Obviously I'm running into the "I've been doing this for *years* and *never* had this kind of problem -- until *you* messed it up" argument.

I ran into a similar problem when in the process of performing some routine maintenance on the workstations I had cleared the web browser history -- apparently there were a few users that were relying on the browser history to remember all of the websites they were visiting (i.e. they didn't feel the need to bookmark any important webpages). Fortunately I've not run into anybody who insisted on storing files in the "Recycle Bin"... yet...