support for ancient ubuntu releases

I've got a couple of machines that probably won't upgrade nicely, and the "gee why can't you upgrade them" comments are useless.  The ones I had were appliance downloads popular at the time I obtained them, and there was not the usual trail of how they were built accompanying them.

since one is my email archive I will continue to run it till SMTP POP3 and IMAP protocols die without any update.

Here is a link which worked for my oldest version, hardy, which is Ubuntu 8.  The date of the release is to probably 2006 maybe earlier.

https://superuser.com/questions/339537/where-can-i-get-the-repositories-for-old-ubuntu-versions

Here is the most useful answer (including the useless suggestion to update). 

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Your system is End-of-Line (EOL), therefore not officially supported. Unless you have a good reason for sticking with 9.04, upgrade to a newer version. 16.04 is the next long-term supported release for Ubuntu, which will continue to receive updates.
To access old Ubuntu repositories, take a look at http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/.
There is also an official Ubuntu documentation for EOL upgrades
They say you should be able to access your packages by putting the following into /etc/apt/sources.list. Important: Change CODENAME to your distribution's code name, e.g. jaunty.

## EOL upgrade sources.list
# Required
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ CODENAME main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ CODENAME-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ CODENAME-security main restricted universe multiverse

# Optional
#deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ CODENAME-backports main restricted universe multiverse

Just run apt-get update and you can use them.