I get that our community tends to accept this kind of behavior, but I think we should really put effort into coming up with some method of discouraging people from acting this way.
I've long advocated for adopting toolserver-l's mailing list etiquette guideline on all Wikimedia mailing lists. It's available here: https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Mailing_list_etiquette.
That guideline basically just says don't top post. It doesn't really address aggressive, offensive or hostile behavior, which is something we actually have a problem with. We have this problem on basically all of our lists, so I'm not saying it's limited to this one.
- Ryan