I meant avast the program not Alwil the company and neither keep copies of emails (outside of if you sent it to the chest) that is the preserve of your email client. Even infected emails sent to the chest are pretty much useless as trying to put them back (restore) into a .pst file could corrupt the .pst file with the potential loss of multiple emails.
MS outlook uses .pst files for storing emails, the problem being these are large archive files containing all your emails, an email isn't stored as a separate file, but contained inside the .pst files. These are not easy to search as they can't really be opened outside Outlook in anu user readable format.
So if you can't find it using the search/find function inside Outlook 2000, I believe it has gone to meet its maker and is not in the ether.