Deleted Exchange account in Outlook, lost all e-mails!

Ok, so the situation is a bit more severe than the Title would have you think.  Normally, you can just re-create the Exchange account and all is well, I assume.  Well, the situation here is:  Company was sold last week, two employees went with the former owner, and the three of them have an office across town.  The owner's data was exported to a PST and imported under a regular POP3 account -- no data lost.

However, somebody else did some kind off offline trick (no idea - not overly familiar with Exchange to begin with) so the other two could still see their old messages even though they weren't on the same network as the Exchange server and couldn't use it to send/receive new messages.

No problem so far, until tonight when Employee #2 deletes her Exchange account in Outlook 2007 thinking it wasn't needed.  Now she lost all of her e-mails, contacts, etc.

is there any way to get those back?  The only way to *MAYBE* reach/connect to the old Exchange server is via a VPN connection, but I can't guarantee the new IT guys haven't blocked access for these users or whatever -- even though these three should be allowed access for a few months after the sale.