Okay...all this 'wiping' and 'erasing' is making me a little nervous.

Mainly I just wanted to know if my friend could find his old deleted emails without paying some computer guy a small fortune. If this isn't something he can easily do without the wipe and erase method, please tell me because I already told him it couldn't be done at all. Sounds like from you guys I'm definitely wrong about that. Dalek sent me this link to an interesting spot where you can find the dat files, but you can't read any deleted emails from what I could find on my own computer. So still kind of confused on exactly what this computer guy thinks he might be able to find.

I do find the wiping and erasing threads interesting...I looked at eraser and it sounds like you can erase only some parts you want without erasing the whole hard drive. Now THAT sounded interesting! Is the same true with the 'wiping' program? Or would that entail wiping the entire hard drive?