Mailman
For the Titan Robotics Club, I mostly stood by while Bob set up Mailman. He managed to get everything working extrodinarily well, even making all of my mail work better (especially with AOL) , by using Comcast’s mail server as a smarthost.
Now, Mailman isn’t a perfect solution to the TRC’s needs. For example, each mailing list a user subcribes to creates what is essentially another user account. This list-centric thinking instead of user-centric thinking means that the a single user could have to remember a seperate passwords for each list, unless they explicitly set them up the same. This is a true issue, and the designers of Mailman know it as well (its on their list of things to fix in upcoming versions).
However, the more I become familiar with Mailman, the more I am impressed by its consistent design philosophy and robust nature. So far, it has caught every single bounced email (no eternal loops like the MeetingCenter would send out), its archives are excellent resources, and its admin pages are feature-rich and while not compact, overall quite well laid out.
Three cheers for Mailman. I might learn Python just to help out with the project.