We periodically try this at our company, and in fact mailing lists are also available as newsgroups. Most people don't use the newsgroups. Part of the problem i

We periodically try this at our company, and in fact mailing lists are also available as newsgroups. Most people don't use the newsgroups. Part of the problem is on the client side - Thunderbird keeps newsgroups as separate folders so you don't have a unified inbox the way you do with email. So you have to check each folder and see if there's anything new. People like the immediacy of email and having one place to check for new messages. On the server side, newsgroups don't track things like whether you've read a message or not. So you can't easily move between a laptop and phone and still have things kept in sync - all of your interactions have to happen through a single client program.