Recover hard deleted items from Exchange

The solution your third-party friend provided is very reasonable and is how I would proceed myself.

What I would not do is manually add additional SMTP addresses to individual user accounts, ever. If you did somehow need to maintain the old user's email address for forwarding to a new user after you delete the old user's AD account, I'd recommend creating a mail-enabled group with an Exchange Alias that matches the old user's Alias such that the group gets the same email address as the "old user". Put the user(s) who should receive those emails into that group.

(In general, you should use groups to assign additional SMTP addresses to users rather than doing it by hand. If you have turnover and need to give someone's replacement the same set of custom SMTP addresses as the "old uesr" you need only put the "new user" into the correct groups.)

Each folder maintains a list of items that were <SHIFT>-<DEL> deleted in that folder. OWA only shows you those items that were deleted when the "Deleted Items" folder was emptied.

If you're not finding the items using "Recover Deleted Items" from OWA you might try using Outlook to open the user's mailbox. The procedure varies per the version of Outlook, but, essentially, you're talking about setting the "DumpsterAlwaysOn" registry value (see http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=246153), opening up the user's mailbox in Outlook, and attempting to recover deleted items. (See http://hosting.intermedia.net/support/kb/default.asp?id=728 for some background on recovering deleted items in various Outlook versions.)

If you're not finding the items that way then you're going to be stuck restoring a backup into a recovery storage group and getting the items out that way. The procedure will vary depending on the backup software you're using, but you can get a bird's eye view of the procedure here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997694(EXCHG.80).aspx