In regard to your inquiry
Yes, I have. There are sooooo many that I cannot count but do remember a few specific incidents. Everyone ranging from the normal home user to business owners and c-level execs. Grandmother who lost family photos in emails kept in Deleted Items, attorneys and other firms involved in litigation who thought it smart to store the relevant emails in Deleted Items rather than creating a new folder. Seriously. I literally cannot fathom why. Why?!
Fortunately in almost every case I was able to recover them by slightly altering the header of the PST and run of SCANPST against it. Outlook Express was a little different but not impossible, and Outlook's Recover Deleted Items against Exchange has been a life-saver more than once. I want to say that fortune smiled on all but two or three lost souls who emptied their Deleted Items so long before discovering missing information that they were no longer recoverable.
My first encounter as a fresh and new IT consultant was a migration into Exchange 2003 before any service pack releases. We were going to head right up against limitations of the data stores, even with multiples. It was decided that we would clear users' Deleted Items before the import, which we found greatly and significantly reduced the amount of required space. Cue a call two days later from accounting. Fortunately, and I really have no idea why we did this, but copies of their PSTs were made before emptying the trash.
Harsh lessons learned.
I, too, have used similar analogues with my customers: would you store your lunch in your recycle bin or trash can?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
