Actually, deleting the email would not have actually deleted the email. The delete action would have just have returned the disk address back to the address free list and would have allowed any other application running on the server to have written over that location on disk.
This is why we have diskcrashgate. Saying that the harddrives crashed allowed them to be removed from the machines and, ooooopsssie, allowed them to be recycled. Our Bad.
ping