Found this over at the Planet GNOME pages, which seems to have similar bearing on the problem with lists:

	Rather than fragmenting lists by "general topic", which seems not to work, why don't we fragment list traffic on a per discussion basis. Very few discussions will need this, but the few that do we can not destroy the public list's readability for the week+ it takes to run its course.

	<a href="http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/ddl-problems" title="Seth Nickell: A Listy Dilemma">Seth Nickell: A Listy Dilemma</a>

A solution for implementing Seth&#39;s idea (which were based around the same signal-to-noise issues that I thought of) would be to use <a href="http://www.quicktopic.com/">QuickTopic</a>.