This is a feature that some at my school really like and use constantly. There is also something said about integrating this mailing-list-like functionality into an OpenACS based community (allows their forum contributions to be easily listed with other contributions - and eventually earn zorkmints).
Some problems we have run into include funky characters from certain mail programs not getting converted correctly (e.g. ä, ö, etc. from Apple Mail - I think it uses rich text for content-transfer-encoding) and endless loops caused by vacation programs (this might be fixed already).
I do not think you will run into any show-stoppers that can not be fixed.
