Why Mailing Lists / BBs needs Tags

I am currently subscribed to the OpenOffice developer's mailing list, and it sucks because the mail stream consists of:

Re: Issue X -> Re: Re: Issue X (x50) -> Re: Issue Y ...

Even if my mail program compressed it to Re: Issue X, Re: Re: Issue X, Re: Issue Y, ... it would still be confusing because the majority of posts would be just titled 'a reply to post X'. My proposed solution is that every post should have a permalink to a BB webpage, and users should be able to tag posts.

That way, if I want to know everything about problems with Java in the next release of Open Office, I can just subscribe to the tag 'java' either through email or through RSS. Thats another thing, giving the people the option to subscribe through email or RSS. I suspect some people will prefer email while others will be used to getting their daily update through a reader.