I've written a blog post about this with further details if anyone is interested:

The primary reason I'm sending this email is to appeal to those of you who have been active on the list since before July 2013 (when the switch to GNU Mailman occurred) and to those of you who know now-inactive subscribers who may also have this information.

There is a total black hole in terms of available archived threads from early 1999 to mid 2013. I've contacted the guy who ran the al-qaeda.net node and dug around in the way back machine trying to locate these archives. No luck so far.

I'm worried this information will be lost permanently if a concerted effort isn't made to preserve it now, while some of it is perhaps still preserved on people's hard drives. I have no doubt that some (maybe most) of the threads from the early 2000s may already be lost permanently.

Please get in touch if you think you can help out at all.

Tom Busby