What's the a good mailing list manager/platform?

Question

I maintain a local Japanese conversation group and we're getting big enough that we need to get serious about a real mailing list. What is a good solution?

Good means easy, free, low-maintenance... I'm currently on a mailing list (unrelated to the conversation group) that only admits plain text messages... I would prefer my mailing list to allow any type of email. It would be nice if I didn't have to have a server to manage the list. I would like to offer the ability to let the users read the emails individually or in digests.

Ideas?

Answer 1

Three offerings come to mind:

MailMan - this is Open Source and free. I think it does HTML emails as well and I know it does the digest emails if required. However, it's not a hosted option so unless you can find somewhere to host it for you, then this might not be the way forward.

Google Groups is a second option which is free, hosted and does all the things above, but I don't know off the top of my head if you can send HTML emails with it easily.

Yahoo Groups is another one. As with the Google solution, it does everything but I don't know if it does HTML emails, so it might need some trial and error on your part.