Good bye mailing lists

After using Stackoverflow for sometime, I've decided to experiment with it as a substitute for internal (company) mailing lists.
Stackoverflow doesn't seem to have any internal hosting options. So I did a little search and figured out OSQA. It looks very promising and in fact I find its UI more appealing that stackoverflow's. Shapado comes as a close second. Though to be honest I haven't done an extensive comparison. (so the "second" verdict isn't to be taken too seriously)

Here's why I think QA system makes more sense compared to mailing list
1. Politeness
The striking difference between QA and mailing lists is the politeness. If you ask a bad question on comp.lang.c you would be flamed. And the meanest reply comes from the highest authority in the group. Well there's no such notion but that's what the readers would perceive anyway.
Its another story when it comes to QA systems. There the seeker has the option to rate up and rate down the answers (so do the readers) and he also has the right to choose the best answer. And points is the basic currency in the system.

2. Use as a knowledge base
The fact that the user marks the best answer. And the community rates answers, as a reader you would always like QA system more than searching on mailing list. The common scenario in mailing list is that the OP never gives a feedback on what worked for him or not.

3. Quality of content
Again because of the rating, both parties want to write presentable stuff.

4. Tagging
Often the same mail belongs to many mailing lists. Its difficult to choose one. Cross posting is even worse. The QA systems allow to search questions (and answers by tags)
So if you tag your question well, you'd reach the right audience.

We are starting to use this on a small scale within our group and if all goes well, the plan would be to replace our internal mailing lists.
It looks pretty straight forward to migrate existing mailing list threads to OSQA too.

That said, not *all* mailing lists can be replaced (please excuse the title) The announcements and general discussions still hold good for mailing lists.

Stay tuned for more updates on this front! (non technical)