Recreating yahoo or google groups

Ha! I had the same question, and I was working on a long post, but I'll just piggyback on this one.

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I belong to a non-profit motorcycle club with four chapters and ~250 members. We just migrated the web site www.floribamariders.com to Drupal.

We currently use a single Yahoo group for our mailing list, but the chapters complain about the cross-talk. Ideally, we would move the Yahoo Groups functionality to our main site and use a single sign-on. To get there, I would like to mail-enable four forums, one for each chapter. If a member posts to the Birmingham forum, all the Birmingham people would receive an e-mail containing the post. Users should have the ability to opt in and out of these mailings.

Environment: shared host (Pair Networks www.pair.com - highly recommended, BTW)

Versions: Drupal 5.7, FreeBSD 6.2, Apache 2.2.4, PHP 5.2.5, MySQL 5.0.45

Mail Config: The host uses qmail. It's possible to invoke custom programs (PHP, Perl, Procmail, whatever) every time mail arrives for a specific e-mail address. Also, the host offers Mailman 2.1.9 for e-mail list functionality. See http://www.pair.com/support/knowledge_base/e-mail/using_qmail.html and http://www.pair.com/services/mailing_lists/

The host's TOS require that you send mail in batches of 25 messages at a time. We could consider moving to our own server if necessary, but we would prefer not to go this route.

Is there a way to accomplish this Yahoo Groups-type functionality? I have read a bunch about Organic Groups List Manager (og2list), but it seems to require the Exim MTA. Also, the project does not seem to be under active development. Does CiviCRM include mail/forum integration?

What other solutions exist?

TIA,
John

P.S. I did read "HowTo: Integrate mailing lists with forums using listhandler and mailhandler" (http://drupal.org/node/40777), but I was a little confused by one of the comments that said, "If you're using Drupal 4.7 or above, this recipe will likely not work [...]"