The email account the user account was created with has not changed for the lifetime of the account and I can certainly GPG sign from that.
There very well may be Bitcoin addresses in the PMs that I could verify against, but I'm not sure if there.
The reasons why I want to unlock my account:
1) It's an account created in 2010 and I have PMs with various people over the years, some of whom I'd like to reconnect with.
2) It is actually not a Newbie account. I had it lifted from Newbie status 4 years ago.
Have you followed the procedure at https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/recovering-hacked-accounts-or-accounts-with-lost-passwords-497545 ? You should open a thread like this only after you have followed the procedure mentioned in the link.