I'd like to draw some attention to work being done by Kyle Mathews over on http://drupal.org/project/og_mailinglist that (IMHO) has a great deal of relevance to co-ops & activist groups. He just released the first beta, and while I don't have the expertise necessary to contribute on a code level, I would love to see it continue to mature status.
I collaborate with several activist groups & co-op startups, and mailing lists are a continual frustration. Google groups seem to be pretty dominant, in part because of their web+email interface, well formatted digests, and reasonable UI. Mailman also gets some use, mostly when the group is associated with someone who offers to host & admin a list on their behalf.
But for all the utility of mailman, google groups, or any other solution, they each suffer from a selection of drawbacks & limitations.
-Inability to arrange groups into sets to mirror committee structure in an organization
-Data going through google
-Complex admin needs
-Limited ACL controls
-Data-liberation & portability
-Keywording & faceted search
-Obtuse list subscribing & management (even intelligent folks can be confused by mailman)
-It's not Drupal (Which could stand alone as a smart-alec comment, but really means that content from discussions can't be linked to other site content like issues, wikis, whatever)
There are of course some workable solutions already in Drupal, most of them were reviewed in the initial thread that preceded og_mailinglist: http://groups.drupal.org/node/42688
So thanks to Kyle for working on this for a while as a solo-contrib project, and maybe some folks who didn't know about his work will be interested.
My Co-op would be interested in beta-testing, but we lack root/VPS, which is still required at this point. If anyone feels like setting up an instance, I can bring the testers. :)
Comments
Organic Groups Quick Join
I agree, OG Mailinglist Rocks. To make it rock even better, I have created a new module and released it on Drupal.org which will work very nicely with OG Mailinglist:
Organic Groups Quick Join allows for people to quickly join your Drupal site and join Organic Groups & Drupal Roles through a form on a block. The roles and Groups available to the user are configurable. The typical use case is to be able to join Organic Groups so as to receive messages from that organic group via the OG Mailinglist module. This module is meant to make Drupal work like MailChimp, Constant Contact, Mailman, or another e-mail listserv mailing list. This module is best used in conjunction with Captcha or other tools to filter away spam.