Have you looked at Organic Groups ? http://drupal.org/project/og I think this project is one that should best fit a Yahoo Groups like. However, you may need to devellop some missing features, so feel free to get in touch with them. I don't know the project so much as I don't currently use it, but feel free to ask more support there.
Regards
We are doing this at Jolug.org we've installed mailhandler, listhandler and it works just great with mailman but there is few problems users who post using the website end they have to have same email address subscribed to the mailing list
and the listhandler has to have some mail striping