patchwork rulez!
Some time ago, Jeremy Kerr wrote the patchwork program as a means to track patches sent to mailing-lists (specifically netfilter-devel in our case).
I'm now using it more-or-less frequently and it has already uncovered a number of patches that got lost otherwise. Therefore I consider it a very helpful tool. Hopefully reports of netfilter-devel being "a write-only mailing-list" will cease now..