Yeti has a good idea on reworking bylines. A number of us have altered our "handles" for various reasons. The main reason I had for doing it was so my real name didn't end up with 8000 entries in Google, which is kind of asking for it.
Is it possible to do some kind of "global" replace on old messages with current handles before opening all the files to Google? A survey should of course be taken first to see which handle everyone wants to use, or even if someone wants it done at all to their own messages.