E-mail fora (forums?)

We are toying with adding several mailing lists, but don't know what the response would be. We would split the current BookNews e-mail list into 4 options:
1) Keep the same (text)
2) HTML
3) New and noteworthy only
4) Sales only
(I guess that is really 6, since 3 & 4 could be text or HTML.)

And, we are toying with the idea of hosting a beginning Hebrew e-mail forum. We have a recently retired Hebrew professor who is willing to "moderate" it. But, is there enough interest? And how do you launch something like that? Perhaps with every beginning Hebrew grammar we send out include a blurb about it?