Multiple email notification jobs

[Michael Pokraka]

Hi all,
This is probably a rhetorical question, but ....
Client would like two seperate instances of the 'you have items in your inbox' email notification job running. In effect, one instance will send notificaitons for a certain bunch of tasks, and the other for the rest. The reason is that certain tasks require a different text.
No problem thinks we, define two variants, job 1 for a bunch of tasks and job 2 excluding same. Problem: Job now takes over an hour to run.
Solution (after a bit of digging): do not use negative selection criteria as that causes the database to ignore indexes.
Sooo, we are looking at maintaining a task catalog and having these two jobs running with a selection criteria of a lot of tasks (over 200 in total). Aside from performance, maintaining this will be a PITA.
Has anyone else implemented any clever workarounds to this little dilemma?
Any feedback appreciated... even on a Friday,
Happy weekend,
Mike