Quoting Michael Paoli (Michael.Paoli@cal.berkeley.edu):
I did manage to retrieve a fair chunk of older BALUG history/archives.
Thanks to The Internet Archive, I got what would seem to be much of the older mail list materials. Covering from approximately 1997-01-27 through approximately 2001-02-11. We have the list materials from 2001-06-15 going forward.
Impressive.
If you have (or can get) the mbox files, it's possible to rebuild the current mailman archives to present the mailing list as a seamless whole. The offsetting disadvantage (minor) would be that the URLs of currently archived postings would change.
I can describe how to go about that, if interested. Might be best by telephone. (Basically, you cat together a composite mbox. Then, you run the $MAILMAN_HOME/bin/arch utility with appropriate options and parameters to build the archive. What then results usually has at least one bit of garbage at the end of the Web archive: This results from misparses of lines _within_ a message body that start with flush-left text "From " -- misparsing that as the beginning of a new message. You then have to track down that line in the mbox and fix it, e.g., by prefacing it with ">". Then, build the archive again. Repeat until clean.
If your regex-fu is better than mine, you might be able to spot those lines programmatically (as distinct from the same string at a legitimate beginning of a message's headers, in its role as the first few characters of an envelope header), and fix them before the _first_ build.
Anyway, I/we will likely make these older materials available (at least what we've got or been able to retrieve thus far) in the not-too-horribly-distant future.
I very much respect and admire this effort: It's all too common for the new Web guys to just discard the entire group's history up to that point -- and a significant batch of work to later correct that error.