recovering deleted email

This uh…. friend of mine, set the auto archive in outlook to “delete permenately”. In exchange we did not have it set to retain any deleted users or emails. It is now…. Does anyone know a trick to recover email that has been deleted. We have backup tapes…. but the backup tapes were not set to back up each user. It only backs up all of exchange. The exchange server is running 2000 server. I have a brand new empty server running 2003 server. I was thinking of using the backup tape on the new server and pulling the .pst file. Then loading that .pst in my Outlook. Is this a bad idea? Does anyone know a better way? I am a newbie, please help me!