[RightFighter]

Even if it is a disaster-recovery backup which can only be restored in full, not by individual mailbox, they could (fairly) easily restore the backup to a Recovery Storage Group for the purposes of mounting the database and retrieving the emails from an individual account.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb124961%28v=exchg.65%29.aspx

[nhwingut]

Even if it is a disaster-recovery backup which can only be restored in full, not by individual mailbox, they could (fairly) easily restore the backup to a Recovery Storage Group for the purposes of mounting the database and retrieving the emails from an individual account.

I have been working on Microsoft servers since the days of NT. I can assure you that if they wanted Lerner's mailbox back it would have been a simple task for an experience network admin.

[Billthedrill]

Even if it is a disaster-recovery backup which can only be restored in full, not by individual mailbox, they could (fairly) easily restore the backup to a Recovery Storage Group

Yep. We did it that way for years. You design your mail stores in relatively manageable sizes and restore the whole thing. XMERGE will then excise the correct mailbox or its contents to a PST file which can be mounted by any Outlook client. It ain't rocket science.