Some of the Wikipedia mailing lists did this a year or two ago, adding a limit of 30 posts per person per month. Not sure it's had any significant impact on the community, but it has somewhat reduced the volume of a few really, really prolific posters, which is a slight improvement to the S:N ratio. (There exist mailing lists where the most prolific posters are also good contributors, but imo this is not true of the Wikipedia lists, so the cap has mostly excluded posts I find noisy/redundant.)
This can be easily countered with setting user quota (per day of week or whatever) on emails to the list. Not that this is a cure for all - but I believe this can improve the democracy of mailing lists. I hope some mailing list management software will add this as an option some day.