Stan,

 

I had about 6 Yahoo Groups before I met Drupal.

 

I moved all of them to the Drupal based forums on my site. A few users wanted a mailing list so I gave them that functionality with Mailman. Oddly enough most of the users who were complaining that they needed a mailing list now prefer the Drupal forums and the users that went to the mailing list are wondering where everyone went!

 

However, there are some of my people that cannot (due to disabilities) navigate the forums well. Most use Speech Recognition and still have problems.  So I'm working with these modules in Drupal to make a bi-directional communication between a forum and a Mailman mailing list: 

 

1) Listhandler

2) Mail Alias

3) Mailhandler

 

I'm still testing but it's working so far using those 3 modules on my sandbox system.  It seems that it should work with any mailing list software to and from a Drupal forum though.

 

The problem I have with PhpBB is even though it is good software and very popular, it's too popular with the "let's spread mayhem" crowd. I just spent the last weekend helping clear a set of trojan's from a PHPBB's Forum index page. I guess I'm just too serious about my site for those games.  I'm unaware of any tie-in software between PhpBB and Drupal however.

 

There is another problem I've found with mailing list servers.  The majority of them require root access to install or get them to work after the install.  If you're using a shared server it's not possible for you to put most of them on your system.  You may have to get the host company to do it if they will and you might still have problems.

 

One other factor I had in mind was that I wanted all relevant material in one place and searchable as many people use my lists/site as reference material.

 

Hope that's of help.

 

Skip

 

I have a couple of phpbb forums, and would like people to have the ability
to post to these forums via e-mail and receive forum messages via e-mail
if they so choose. In other words, I'm looking for "Yahoo Groups"-like
functionality.

Can Drupal do this?

I'm considering installing mailman and mail2forum which, combined with the
phpbb I already have installed, is supposed to do this.

I've also looked into mailgust, which might work, but isn't open source.

Is there a good/popular solution here? Suggestions? Opinions?

Is there another open-source product that does this? (combining separate
apps to perform a larger task is very Unix-y, but phpbb and mailman are
both fairly complex, so a single app that does both might be more useful).

I'm not married to phpbb-- my forums are small + I could easily transfer
them to drupal or another app. For example, I've heard phorum has mailing
list support built-in, though it doesn't quite seem to do what I want.

I've seen at least a couple of discussion threads that say "It's hard to
believe, but no such open-source product exists", but I don't believe them :)