WE just set up an e-mail account with Yahoo rather than using the yahoo groups. That gave us our own e-mail address for the PTO. We could also set up groups. As for managing e-mail addresses I think you'll have that problem no matter how you do it.
Do you have any idea what the fee is? (ballpark?) I've been playing around with Yahoo Groups which is free but I can tell that managing the addresses is going to be a bear because it does not alphabetize the "members". It puts the email addresses in alphabetical order which is weird to me. For example, if I want to check and see if "John L. Winters" is already a member, I can't look under the "W's" I have to just search this rather large list to find him??? uggghhh.
For managing one-way email distributions, I recommend Constant Contact. www.constantcontact.com. It is fee-based but worth it, in my opinion. You can manage multiple lists; you can do some nice html formatting things; people can subscribe or unsubscribe; it tracks statistics on how many open your message and click on the links, etc.
We've integrated it with our Web site so that users of the site see an e-mail registration box; then we send them a reminder once a week of new stuff at the site.
SHC - Yahoo Groups does allow you to turn on (or off) most features. We only allow moderators to post messages. We have the calendar turned on but the chat feature turned off.
As far as setting up groups within the group, I'm not aware of any feature like that.
