How to watch a mailing list & repo for patches which affect a certain area of code?

I've got patches in various projects, and I don't have time to keep up with the mailing list, but I'd like to help out with maintenance of that code, or the functions/files it touches. People don't cc me. I figure I could filter the list, test patches submitted, commits made, mentions of files/functions, build filters based on the code I have in the repo even if it's been moved or changed subsequently. I'm wondering what other people have implemented already for automation around this, or general thoughts. Web search is not showing me much.