I move into a neighbourhood of new houses in 2007. One of the guys there worked IT at a university and set up a mailing list of the neighbourhood. It was used successfully for all sorts of coordination, neighbourhood watch, internal news, etc.

There's always someone mis-using it, and the same applies to every other platform. There's always someone hijacking forum threads, or asking questions in comments instead of starting a new topic. None of this is exclusive to email.