Mail client

I'm building a website for my robotics team, the ligerbots. This past year, we had a ton of trouble with contact lists - people would send to misspelled emails, or members would be missing altogether. I want to try and solve that with Drupal. What I need is a module that can let anyone send an email to a group, such as the group that programs the robot, or the coaches.
Right now, I'm running Mass Contact and have a dozen roles. It works, but its an eyesore for me and god forbid I need another role. Additionally, permissions are a headache and creating an account requires selecting which groups to fit into.
So, any ideas/wrong thread/anything?