Any chance we could get a "send me an e-mail when somebody follows up to a thread I've posted to" feature added? I think this could significantly increase the quality of submissions and discussions about patches.
You might not want to hear this, but the proper thing to do is file a feature request for project.module. You could also bug the maintainer personally if you wish. See http://drupal.org/project/project for the maintainer (see the Submitter of that node). I agree that this would be a useful feature. We have a related feature already where you can subscribe to all issues which you create (that would have caught your two example). See project module's many subscription options - http://drupal.org/project/issues/subscribe. Techniques for making these options more visible are welcome.