OS X V10.5 Leopard :: Recovering Emails From A Deleted Account?

I spent the better part of the afternoon trying to sort out a mail sending issue with my work Macbook (10.5.8).I basically receive email from 2 accounts ( personal email account and work wmail account). Because I'm behind a proxy server at work I had to play around with the settings so that I could send emails via the work account but receive replies to my personal account. I spent a bit of time playing with the settings and trying different things.  Eventually I got everything working fine, BUT in the process I decided to delete my personal account and re-configure it. Again, all went well, except for the fact that the 2K emails (collected over the past year or so) sitting in my in-box were removed as well. When I added my personal email account back in I only got emails that were currently sitting on the (pop) mail server. The previous years worth of emails dissapeared. Where do emails go when you remove an email account from osx mail? Surely they don't delete without trace? is it possible to recover those emails from a delted account?