A quick question on vbulletin, can it run a mailing list that mirrors forum?

I know there are a large number of people who prefer mailing lists to forums, so if all messages sent to forum could be replicated as mailing list 2 birds could be killed with 1 stone.. so to speak

Do you mean like, as posts are created, users can be notified, or do you mean a 'daily digest' where all the posts from the previous 24 hours are available?

daily digest and/or real time email list

I don't believe that vbulletin supports daily digests. However, you could build a simple app to do it. We extract the threads of interest from the mysql database and then put them on our main website front page.

You could do the same except your app can then get all current members in the same way and email the digest to each of them.