Email isn’t usually stored on a person’s pc. There are servers and tape backups and regulations requiring organizations to have access to the last seven years worth of records. That her computer crashed and the hard drive was lost is an idiot’s excuse that the sheeple are expected to believe.
A person's PC is one of the places email is stored. Just because the PC crashed does not mean the email that was on that PC's hard drive is lost. Most likely that isn't the cause of the crash. The most likely cause is caps gone bad on the system board or video card. Most of the time the data on the hard drive of a "crashed" PC can be recovered. I do understand email servers and tape backups also having copies of email archived.