As a former Gaia Admin, there's actually a lot more to Google Groups as the source of auth truth; In fact, I would describe it the other way around. Google Grou

As a former Gaia Admin, there's actually a lot more to Google Groups as the source of auth truth; In fact, I would describe it the other way around. Google Groups is an authentication system that happens to have a mailing list feature, though I'll definitely say that the UI is fairly bad for both. I will point you, though, to the fact that Active Directory works exactly the same way, and has exactly as bad an interface for both. It's like there's a natural local maximum these products get stuck in, because there's no reasons to build two interfaces for the same product, even though it's used two very different ways.