I've been really surprised by the lack of any sort of listserv / mailing list creation and management modules in Drupal. We've been using mailman for a few years now and have grown tired maintaining it. We'd like to merge that functionality into Drupal so that the users only need to change their email addresses in one location. Since no one modules exists do handle the functionality of a listserv (as far as I can tell), I'd like to piece one together or just create my own.

Here's the basic functionality we need:

• User sends out email and all members of a particular role receives that email.
• User's do not ever have to visit the website except to create their account.

In essence, I imagined that a module to post content via email (1.) + a module to notify all users about a particular content post (2.) = listserv (3.).

(1.) The mailhandler module allows creation of nodes via email and sets the author to the user associated with that email's sender. If the sender's email doesn't exist, it doesn't get posted (great for beating spam!). I created a new content type to handle these emails, and can easily maintain a log of emails sent to the list this way through views. Surprisingly, this was the easy part!

(2.) Two solutions I found immediately were the Subscriptions module and the Notifications module. I tried Notifications for no other reason than it coming up sooner on my modules list. Everything seemed to work as far as I could tell... except that no emails were being sent out. I subscribed a test user to the list, checked permissions, error log - everything I could think of - but I would not receive an email when the content was created.

I had especially high hopes for the Subscriptions module since it was co-created from the ground up by none other than the one-and-only CHX. I liked the interface and configuration options much better for this one, but I ended up with the same end result. Everything looked right, but nothing ever got sent out.

I was confused and convinced that I was doing something wrong, but I have no idea how to check that. As a last try I used triggers and actions to see when that content was created and send out an email... and it (mostly) works! I started out just telling it to email me with the content when new content was posted and it worked flawlessly with email.

Then I realized I really needed to set it up to work with multiple people (or preferably a role) or this would be a useless for this purpose, so I looked around and learned how to create custom triggers using theWorkflow module (to monitor what type of content was created) and the Action Email Role module to send it to a particular role. This also worked great!

(3.) So we have our own Drupal created and maintained listserv. Here are the problems I've encountered so far and just haven't had a chance to tackle today:

• Emails sent out to the role is in plain text (not rich/html). Should the PHPMailer in the Messaging module fix this?
• Occasionally, for some unknown reason, mailhandler via POP3 will not count an email as read - causing it to continuously read it in as a new message and send it out to everyone multiple times. I'm thinking of trying IMAP instead of POP3.
• Emails are sent out from the webmaster's email address (the address registered with Drupal) rather than the listserv email. I'm not sure how to go about fixing this.

So what's the word? Should I keep at it, be using something else, or try to write my own module?