Engtech and I thought this was an excellent suggestion for dealing with the torrents of spam in the akismet panel, but matt disagrees. Engtech wrote a Greasemonkey Script that implements it browser side. I, being afraid of browser bloat, and wanting this for archGFX, not for this wordpress.com blog, hacked it in /wp-admin/wp-admin.css. It’s a hack so simple, i’m embarassed i didn’t think of it sooner:

#spam-list li {
max-height: 6.5em;
overflow: hidden;
margin-bottom: .5em;
}

#spam-list li * {
display: inline;
}

added to the end of the file. (i actually appended it to tiger.css, which works the same.) this is what it looks like:

if that’s not enough context for you, or if it’s more than you need, you can adjust max-height to your liking. if you’re using IE6 or below to review your spam, you’ll want to specify height instead of max-height.